Dame Peggy Ashcroft; Stage Legend Won ‘India’ Oscar

Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Britain’s most renowned stage actress whose later film and television performances made her a beloved international star, died Friday, three weeks after suffering a stroke. She was 83.

The Royal Free Hospital said Dame Peggy, unconscious since she was stricken May 23, died peacefully Friday morning in the presence of her family.

Although she achieved international screen exposure late in her career with the lead role in the British television series “The Jewel in the Crown” and an Oscar-winning performance in the film “A Passage to India,” Dame Peggy always referred to the stage as her first love.

She was virtually unknown to American audiences before the two India-based productions, because the bulk of her career had been on stage and in England. She appeared in stage productions in New York only twice--in “High Tor” with Burgess Meredith in 1937 and in 1947 in “Edward My Son” with Robert Morley. She also appeared in 1973 in Central City, Colo., and at the Kennedy Center in Washington in “The Hollow Crown” with Michael Redgrave.

To protect her privacy and her family--a son and daughter by her third husband, and four grandchildren--she eschewed interviews and publicity.

“I hope you don’t want to talk about me. I’m not good at that,” she told an American reporter at the time of her Academy Award nomination in 1985. “(And) I don’t talk about my family. I’ve made a rule. That’s why I haven’t all my life given many interviews.”

Dame Peggy once told the Associated Press: “I do rather abhor gossipy, personal interviews. I don’t enjoy reading them, and I don’t enjoy taking part in them.”

Esteemed as the greatest actress of her time, Dame Peggy was recognized as a peer of Lord Laurence Olivier, Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud, her partner in many stage triumphs.

“I adore her . . . she’s a marvelous actress . . . so direct and without artifice,” Gielgud said in a recent interview.

She was an exemplary Beatrice, Juliet and Cleopatra, among many of her Shakespeare heroines, and she shone equally in modern plays such as Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” and Edward Albee’s “All Over.”

She retired from the stage in 1982 and soon found a new public worldwide, with David Lean’s 1984 film “A Passage to India” and an Emmy nomination for her performance in “The Jewel in the Crown.”

Her work as the mysterious traveler Mrs. Moore in Lean’s movie, adapted from the E.M. Forster novel, won Dame Peggy an Oscar as best supporting actress.

A “wretched flu,” as she called it at the time, prevented her from accepting the award in person. She later said that had she been there, she would have dedicated the Oscar to India.

The film also won her the New York Film Critics Circle best actress award and the Golden Globe as best supporting actress in a motion picture drama.

As Barbie Batchelor, the former missionary in “Jewel in the Crown,” she gave a performance that critic John Leonard in New York magazine called “the best acting I have seen on TV, including Olivier as Lear.” The role earned her the award as best actress from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Perhaps her greatest stage triumph came in 1963 in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Wars of the Roses,” playing the mad Margaret of Anjou and aging a lifetime in a 10-hour performance.

That play’s co-director, Sir Peter Hall, wrote in 1983 that her strength was her sense of self: “I think Peggy’s a very great person, and her own integrity, her own sense of compassion, her own humility is actually what you see on the stage.”

At her 80th birthday gala at the Old Vic theater in 1987, director Trevor Nunn cast aside his customary restraint and said: “I am nuts about Peggy. I love Peggy. Peggy can do no wrong, has never done any wrong, will do no wrong.”

Born Dec. 22, 1907, Dame Peggy was the daughter of real estate broker William Worsley Ashcroft and amateur actress Violet Maud Bernheim.

She chose at age 13 to go into the theater because, she said, “Shakespeare was the greatest pleasure at school.”

Dame Peggy studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, sharing the school’s gold medal award with classmate Laurence Olivier.

She began her professional career at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in 1926, playing Margaret in J.M. Barrie’s “Dear Brutus” opposite Richardson.

She went on to appear opposite most of the brightest lights of her profession: Michael Redgrave, Wendy Hiller, Peter O’Toole, Vanessa Redgrave, Alec Guinness and Paul Robeson.

Gielgud cast her as Juliet at Oxford in 1932 in his first professional directing assignment.

She later played Ophelia to Gielgud’s Hamlet, Titania to his Oberon (1944-45), Cordelia to his Lear and Beatrice to his Benedick (both 1950).

Her film credits include a small role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” (1935). She also appeared in “The Nun’s Story” (1951), “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971) and “Joseph Andrews” (1976).

Dame Peggy was the only living British actor (a term she preferred over “actress”) to have a theater named after her--in her native Croyden, Surrey, south of London.

Her popularity increased last year with the A&E; cable network showing of “Murder by the Book,” a television movie in which she appeared as the popular writer Agatha Christie opposite Ian Holm as her fictional detective Hercule Poirot.

She also made a cameo appearance last year on BBC and PBS’ “Masterpiece Theater,” and starred in “Cream in Your Coffee,” a British television production that had its American premiere on Los Angeles’ KCET last July.

In April, she was heard on BBC radio in the world premiere of Tom Stoppard’s play, “In the Native State.” That same month, she received a special award for lifetime achievement in theater at a gala in the Olivier Theatre.

She was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956.

Dame Peggy mellowed slightly in her later years, agreeing to a few interviews to publicize “Passage to India” because of her love and support for India.

“It’s only created a sort of uproar temporarily, I hope,” she said after the film and television series about India made her an instant multimedia celebrity. “Because I realize that film success is a quite different thing from theater. I mean theater is part of one’s life. It has its criticisms and all that--and a few awards given to it. But a film, there’s a sort of brouhaha goes on, doesn’t it? A big fuss is made. So that gets into your life stream and shakes you up a bit.”

She agreed to do more television and film in her later years, she explained, because neither exacted a severe physical toll. A knee operation had made it difficult for her to stand for long periods of time.

“Life hasn’t changed that much. It just goes on,” she said when she was 77. “I’ve taken to films and television in my old age because it isn’t so hard-going as acting in the theater.”

Dame Peggy was married, and divorced, three times: to actor Rupert Hart-Davis in 1929, Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky in 1934, and lawyer Lord Jeremy Hutchinson in 1940.

The third marriage lasted 25 years, and produced two children: son Nicholas, who lives in Canada, and daughter Liza, who lives in France.