[1] She played in a silent film called A Welsh Singer, directed by and featuring Henry Edwards in 1915, and also had a minor role in another 1915 film, A Honeymoon for Three, starring Charles Hawtrey. The body of Edith Evans was never recovered and there was no evidence or photograph of her. Short Illness Following A Stroke And A Heart Attack. When she first read through the role of Lady Bracknell with Gielgud she commented, "I know those sort of women. At the Queen's Theatre in November 1963, she played Violet in Gentle Jack by Robert Bolt. [15] What troubled many, including Agate and Gielgud, about her Cleopatra and other tragic heroines was not her appearance but a sense that tragedy came less naturally to her than comedy. By contrast, she played a downtrodden maid in The Late Christopher Bean (1933), a deranged, impoverished old woman in The Whisperers (1967) and – one of her most celebrated roles – the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, which she played in four productions between 1926 and 1961. [5][7] Over the next ten years she polished her craft in a wide range of parts. July 23rd/24th Edith Evans away through illness. In The Guardian, Nicholas de Jongh wrote of her evident frailty, "Yet she can still give the single words and phrases an imperious or serene grandeur, as in her final speaking of Richard Church's poem where she welcomed 'that summoning touch of death our neighbour'. Edith was ever grateful for her Utah Valley heritage. [5] While she was in New York playing the Nurse opposite the Juliet of Katharine Cornell her husband died suddenly in London. [38] Her films from the first half of the 1960s were Tom Jones (1963), The Chalk Garden and Young Cassidy (both made in 1964). While working in a milliner's shop in the Cityshe … Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile, St. Paul's, Covent Garden, London, England, The Importance of Being Earnest (15-Oct-1952), Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile. [5], In 1960 Evans played Judith Bliss in a television production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever. But it is not, of course, the flatlet which stays in the memory". Her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. She had one sibling, a brother who died at the age of four. Simon Lack, Actor: Enemy at the Door. Her performance divided opinion: in The Observer Ivor Brown wrote of "the glorious impact of an authentic genius at the highest level of world-theatre",[34] but the anonymous reviewer in The Times thought that she "remains, a little mysteriously, outside of the character". [8] [9][10] She then appeared in East is East in 1917, but thereafter made no more films for over thirty years. [11] She toured in Shakespeare with Ellen Terry's company in 1918, appeared in light comedy alongside the young Noël Coward (Polly With a Past, 1921) and played five new Shavian roles, Lady Utterword in Heartbreak House (1921)[n 2] and the Serpent, the Oracle, the She-Ancient and the ghost of the Serpent in Back to Methuselah (1923). "[17] Arnold Bennett noted in his journals that this Millamant was the finest comedy performance he had ever seen. [1][n 4] During the 1930s she played in several Broadway seasons, some productions transferred from London and others new. [6] Her last public appearance was a BBC radio programme With Great Pleasure, a selection of her favourite works, given before an invited audience in August 1976. [3], Evans's West End debut was in George Moore's Elizabeth Cooper in 1913. [33] In November of the same year she made one of her rare appearances in Chekhov, as Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard. 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