Hume Cronyn, 91; Durable Actor in One of the Famed Partnerships of Stage, Film

Hume Cronyn, the short, wiry actor with a drive for perfectionism who over a seven-decade career turned out memorable stage and screen portrayals of ordinary, often cantankerous characters, died of prostate cancer Sunday at his home in Fairfield, Conn. He was 91.

Also a noted writer and director, he was perhaps most beloved as half of what had been an extraordinary acting team: His frequent collaborator in the theater and movies was Jessica Tandy, his wife of 52 years, who died in 1994.

Among their most celebrated joint appearances were their roles in plays such as “The Fourposter” (1951) and “The Gin Game” (1977) and in the movies “Foxfire” (1987) and “Cocoon” (1985).

Cronyn and Tandy were named to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1979. Their other awards include a National Medal of the Arts in 1990, and in 1994, the first Special Lifetime Achievement Award presented at the Tony Awards.

Neither, however, ever seemed ready to retire and rest on their glories. “Perhaps the Cronyns are the last true theater professionals,” Mike Nichols, who directed them on Broadway in “The Gin Game,” told Time magazine in 1990.

Remarkably, Cronyn and Tandy’s careers seemed to grow rather than diminish as they approached their 80s. Cronyn was still being hired for leading roles in 1989, when he starred in the television drama “Age Old Friends.” Tandy won an Academy Award for “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1990. Cronyn’s autobiography, “A Terrible Liar,” appeared in 1991.

But Cronyn also had a distinguished career on his own. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the 1944 film “The Seventh Cross” and received a Tony for his role as Polonius in the 1964 production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” directed by John Gielgud. He also won three Emmys.

He became an actor in spite of the expectations of his privileged, moneyed family.

He was born in London, Ontario, Canada, where his father was a financier and member of the Canadian House of Commons and his mother belonged to the Labatt brewing family. “Junior,” as they called him, was groomed to follow in his father’s steps.

As the youngest by 13 years of five children, he remembered a lonely childhood made lonelier by his scrawniness. When he was 10, he put on his own production of “The Green Goddess,” playing the George Arliss part, and knew that he wanted to act. His parents, both avid theatergoers, took him to see plays in London, England, when he was 15, an experience that further fed the fire in him.

In 1930, he enrolled in McGill University to study law. But he left school before his freshman finals to work in a stock company in Washington. He ran out of money and had to return to school the next year. His mother promised him that if he still wanted to be an actor at the end of the year, she would help him enroll in the best acting school possible.

In the midst of the Depression, in 1932, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. He made his Broadway debut two years later, playing a janitor in the comedy “Hipper’s Holiday,” which ran for all of four performances in 1934.

More than two dozen stage roles followed in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and summer stock or repertory theaters, before he acted in his first film. In 1942, Alfred Hitchcock happened to see a screen test Cronyn had done for Paramount and cast him in “Shadow of a Doubt.” His success portraying Herbie Hawkins, an avid reader of detective stories, put him in demand as a character actor.

He had ended a brief, disastrous first marriage when he met Tandy in 1940. She was appearing on Broadway in the A.J. Cronin play “Jupiter Laughs” when a fellow cast member and mutual friend introduced her to Cronyn. After the show, the British actress went to dinner with Cronyn and the friend, during which Cronyn entertained her with what he thought were “some mildly amusing observations on the nature of English manners, and their quite contradictory idiosyncrasies.” He learned what she thought of his views when she suddenly said, “You are a fool,” in a tone that suggested she had thought so for some time.

Despite their infelicitous first meeting, she agreed to see him again. She soon ended her 10-year marriage to actor Jack Hawkins, with whom she had a child, Susan, and in 1942 married Cronyn.

He and Tandy moved to Hollywood and had a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Tandy. He is also survived by Jessica Tandy’s daughter, and by his third wife, Susan Cooper, a frequent collaborator, whom he married in 1996. Survivors also include eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Cronyn went on to major and minor roles in films over the next 10 years, including “Phantom of the Opera” (1943), “The Seventh Cross” (1944), “Lifeboat” (1944) and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946). In “The Green Years” (1946), he played his wife’s father.

Between roles, the versatile Cronyn wrote short stories, magazine articles and screenplays such as the adaptations for Hitchcock’s motion pictures “Rope” (1948) and “Under Capricorn” (1949).

He co-wrote -- with Cooper -- and co-starred in “Foxfire,” a story of Appalachian traditions. The play was staged on Broadway in 1982, later toured the country and was filmed for television in 1987.

He often worked as a director too. Those efforts included Tennessee Williams’ “Portrait of a Madonna,” in 1946 in Los Angeles, which starred his wife. The acclaim the play brought Tandy led to her being cast in her most famous role, as Blanche du Bois in Williams’ “Streetcar Named Desire,” on Broadway in 1947.

Cronyn directed “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” on Broadway in 1950, and in 1951, appeared with his wife in the hit comedy “The Fourposter,” which ran on Broadway for two years.

On television, Cronyn and Tandy were seen alone or together on such dramatic anthologies as “The Ford Theatre Hour,” “The Kaiser Aluminum Hour” and the cultural kaleidoscope “Omnibus.”

In 1954, Cronyn and Tandy were featured in a situation comedy called “The Marriage,” a scenario dealing with a lawyer and his civic-minded wife. They had first starred in the series on radio, where it fared much better. It lasted only six weeks but is remembered as the first network series to be telecast in color.

Much of Cronyn’s 1991 memoir was devoted to his thoughts about acting. He credited Hitchcock with teaching him one of his first lessons in film acting.

During a dinner scene with Teresa Wright in “Shadow of a Doubt,” she said something shocking to his character, whose reaction was to stand up and push back his chair. When he played the scene, Cronyn also took a step backward. Hitchcock wanted Cronyn to rise and step forward.

But when the cameras rolled again, Cronyn, unaware of the impact on his close-up, again stepped backward, later explaining to the director that stepping forward felt unnatural.

“There’s no law that says actors have to be comfortable,” Hitchcock replied. “Step back if you like -- but then we’ll have a comfortable actor without a head.”

The next time, Cronyn stepped forward.

He became known for a compulsive attention to detail early in his career. During the filming of “The Seventh Cross,” Spencer Tracy was asked what he thought of his young co-star. “The [S.O.B.] would fix the lights if they’d let him!” he growled.

Years later, Cronyn acknowledged that he sometimes felt he had “the soul of a filing clerk” when he prepared for roles. He would write out extensive, detailed character analyses in a notebook. Unlike Tandy, whose character studies began with introspection, Cronyn started from the outside and inched inward.

“I always go through a process of collecting far more material than I can use,” he told an interviewer. “Then I try to retain what is essential. Intellection is important as a process of getting the best out of yourself.”

Cronyn’s devotion to the craft of acting paid off in reviews such as Richard Eder’s in the New York Times after “Gin Game” opened on Broadway. “If Miss Tandy can express 12 different emotions by saying ‘gin’ 12 times, Mr. Cronyn, among many other lovely things, finds 12 different ways of calibrating defeat. His mouth tightens, or he laughs without pleasure, or he shows his teeth, or he leaps to his feet, and each of these is done with absolute emotional command. At one point all he does is turn bright red, wordlessly.”

“Gin Game” playwright D.L. Coburn recalled the latter scene, telling the Los Angeles Times on Monday that Cronyn “had a trick with his neck muscles that got him so red that everyone got alarmed that something was actually happening to him.”

Like Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Cronyn and Tandy were masters of the theatrical tour. He estimated that he and his late wife performed “The Fourposter” 600 times, “A Delicate Balance” 400 times and “Noel Coward in Two Keys” 400 times. They appeared in “Gin Game” about 800 times.

Shortly before “Gin Game” opened in 1977, director Nichols said the Cronyns “are a joy.... As opposed to many actors who do a play every three or four years, they never stop working. They work at their craft all the time -- and it shows.”

In their joint and separate interviews, Cronyn and Tandy often expressed great joy in their long collaboration. “I think I complement Jess and I know Jess complements me.” Cronyn told Time magazine in 1990. “I think we have marvelously and totally coincidentally been a wonderful team,”

One of their last joint appearances was in the 1991 CBS movie “To Dance With the White Dog,” for which Tandy and Cronyn were rewarded with Emmy nominations, but only Cronyn won.

When Tandy died after a five-year battle with cancer, he admitted to going through a bad time. He eventually plunged back into work, accepting a role as a dying cancer patient in “Marvin’s Room,” a 1996 film that also starred Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I was not proud of that film,” he told an interviewer a few years ago. “I know I am an old man and I can expect to play old men, but I tell my agent no wheelchairs, no walkers, no crutches. But even so, that’s what comes.”

Bruce Davison, who appeared with Tandy in “The Glass Menagerie,” remembered the actor Monday as a generous colleague.

“He has given me some of the best acting advice over the years,” said Davison, who would later direct Cronyn in a 2001 TV movie, “Off Season.” Davison’s mother was dying and he was unable to concentrate on his lines.

“Hume just came over to me and said, with words like Tennessee Williams’, ‘You don’t have to act. You don’t have to feel the words. You just say them.’ And then he just told me about the death of his father. I was in tears at the end of it and he said ... ‘Just keep it simple.’ ”