Recent Obituaries, Classic Films Only

[CBHagman]

5. Joyce Redman, actress.

The stage, television, and film actress was 93. She'd played opposite some of the greatest talents of theater and cinema, but is perhaps best known to the public at large for her memorable turn in Tom Jones. See clip above.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/11/joyce-redman?newsfeed=true

Redman was born and bred in Newcastle, County Mayo, one of four sisters in an Anglo-Irish family. She was educated privately by a governess and trained for the stage at Rada in London, making her debut in 1935 as First Tiger Lily in Alice Through the Looking Glass at the Playhouse. She was established as a regular on the West End stage, and in the club theatres, by wartime. She was George Bernard Shaw's Essie, "a wild, timid-looking creature with black hair and tanned skin", in The Devil's Disciple, at the Piccadilly in 1940, followed in 1942 with Maria in Twelfth Night at the Arts theatre and Wendy in Peter Pan at the Winter Garden.

Those Old Vic and New theatre seasons were the defining period: an acclaimed Solveig in the Ralph Richardson production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt; Louka in Shaw's Arms and the Man; Lady Anne in the legendary Richard III of Olivier; Cordelia to the same actor's King Lear; Sonya in Uncle Vanya; and Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV Part 2 (though James Agate, for some reason, thought her too small to play rampageous bawds).

Redman toured to the Comédie-Française in Paris, conquered Broadway, played the title role in Jean Anouilh's Colombe, directed by Peter Brook in 1951, then went to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955 to play Helena in All's Well That Ends Well and Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor. She could play light comedy and stern tragedy, as she demonstrated to many devoted gallery-ites during Olivier's exciting inaugural National theatre seasons at the Old Vic in the early 1960s.