Edith Evans

DAME EDITH EVANS DBE d1976. English actress best known for her work on the stage, but also in films at the beginning and end of her career. She is widely remembered for her portraying of haughty aristocratic women. Between 1964 and 1968, she was nominated for three Academy Awards. Her stage career spanned sixty years during which she played more than 100 roles in various classics including ; Shakespeare / Congreve / Sheridan / Goldsmith and Wilde and plays by contemporary writers including ; Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward. She created roles in two of Shaw's plays: Orinthia in The Apple Cart (1929) and Epifania in The Millionairess (1940) and was in the British premières of two others ; Heartbreak House (1921) and Back to Methuselah (1923). Two of her most famous roles were as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1939) and Miss Western in the 1963 film Tom Jones. By contrast, she played a downtrodden maid in The Late Christopher Bean (1933), a deranged impoverished old woman in The Whisperers (1967) and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (which she played in four productions between 1926 and 1961). She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1946. She died of natural causes at her home in Kent aged 88 on 14th October 1976.