Jessica Tandy

Jessica Tandy was an English-born actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1930 to 1986. Born Jessie Alice Tandy on June 7, 1909, in Hackney, London, she was the youngest of three children born to Harry Tandy, a travelling salesman for a rope manufacturer, and Jessie Helen Horspool, who headed a school for disabled children. Her mother's family came from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Tandy was educated at Dame Alice Owen's School in Islington. Her father died when she was 12, after which her mother supported the family by teaching evening courses.

Tandy made her professional stage debut in London in 1927 at the age of 18. Throughout the 1930s she worked extensively in London's West End, where her roles included Ophelia opposite John Gielgud's Hamlet and Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V. During this period she competed for roles with contemporaries Peggy Ashcroft and Celia Johnson. She also appeared in British films before her marriage to English actor Jack Hawkins ended in divorce in 1940. The couple had a daughter, Susan Hawkins, who became an actress. In 1942, Tandy married Canadian actor Hume Cronyn, with whom she had two children: daughter Tandy Cronyn and son Christopher Cronyn. She became a naturalized United States citizen in 1952.

Her American stage career reached an early pinnacle when she originated the role of Blanche DuBois in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, earning the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 1948. That performance launched a sustained association with Broadway that would yield two additional Tony Awards. In 1978 she won again for The Gin Game, in which she appeared alongside Cronyn, and in 1983 she took a third Tony for Foxfire, once more with Cronyn. The production of Foxfire had its origins at the Stratford Festival, where she and Cronyn joined the acting company in 1976 and returned in 1980 to debut the play. Broadway credits across her career also included The Enemy, The Petition, The Glass Menagerie, and Rose, among other productions. In 1994 she and Cronyn shared a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Alongside her stage work, Tandy maintained a parallel career in film and television spanning more than 60 roles. Her American film debut came in The Seventh Cross in 1944, appearing with Cronyn. Supporting roles followed in The Valley of Decision, The Green Years, Dragonwyck, and Forever Amber, among others. She played a domineering mother in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds in 1963. On radio, she was a regular on Mandrake the Magician as Princess Narda and appeared with Cronyn in The Marriage, which ran from 1953 to 1954 before moving to television. A resurgence in her film career began in the early 1980s with roles in The World According to Garp, Best Friends, Still of the Night, and The Bostonians. She and Cronyn appeared together in Honky Tonk Freeway, Cocoon, Batteries Not Included, and Cocoon: The Return. She also recreated her Tony-winning Broadway role in the Emmy Award-winning television film Foxfire in 1987.

Her performance as an aging Southern Jewish matron in Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 brought her the Academy Award for Best Actress, making her, at 80, the oldest actress to win that honor. A Best Supporting Actress nomination followed for Fried Green Tomatoes in 1991. Subsequent credits included Used People, the television film To Dance with the White Dog with Cronyn, and Camilla. Her final performance came in Nobody's Fool in 1994, completed at the age of 84.

Among her other honors, Tandy received a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award over the course of her career. She was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1979 and received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the National Medal of Arts in 1990. In 1990 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and also suffered from angina and glaucoma, yet continued working. She died on September 11, 1994, at her home in Easton, Connecticut, at the age of 85.