A renowned and beloved international actress, first successful on the London stage, Jessica Tandy captured Broadway as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, making that role forever hers. After a series of major theatrical triumphs and moderate film successes, many with her husband, Hume Cronyn, she won an Oscar for Best Actress at the age of 80 for her performance as Daisy Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.This comprehensive reference guide to Tandy's distinguished career features a biographical sketch followed by a chronology of highlights in her life and chapters documenting her careers in theatre, film, television, and on recordings. Her many awards and honors are listed in a separate chapter. An annotated bibliography selects major book, newspaper, and magazine features and interviews; and reviews are also noted with appropriate productions in the previous chapters. Memorable Broadway roles are illustrated with scenes from Streetcar, The Fourposter (with Hume Cronyn, 1951), Five Finger Exercise (1959), A Delicate Balance (with Cronyn, 1966), The Gin Game (1977), Rose (1981), and Foxfire (with Cronyn, 1982).
Margaret Webster presided over many firsts in the American theater. She was the first woman to direct Shakespearean plays on Broadway, she was one of the founders of the American Repertory Theatre, she was active in the beginning of the Off-Broadway movement, and she wrote an assortment of articles, speeches, memoirs, and autobiographies. This reference provides an overview of her life and a detailed record of her many accomplishments in 20th-century American theater. The volume begins with a biographical essay that discusses her life and career. A chronology then highlights the most significant events in her career. The sections that follow list her many productions for the stage and opera, and provide detailed information about them. A discography is also included, followed by lists of Webster's awards and honors, and a description of the various archives that hold information about her. An extensive annotated bibliography concludes the work.
"In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it."-Marian Seldes"Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading."-Oscar BrockettMargaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72). This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women. Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater.Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.
