Jessica Tandy

A renowned and beloved international actress, first successful on the London stage, Jessica Tandy captured Broadway as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, making that role forever hers. After a series of major theatrical triumphs and moderate film successes, many with her husband, Hume Cronyn, she won an Oscar for Best Actress at the age of 80 for her performance as Daisy Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.

This comprehensive reference guide to Tandy's distinguished career features a biographical sketch followed by a chronology of highlights in her life and chapters documenting her careers in theatre, film, television, and on recordings. Her many awards and honors are listed in a separate chapter. An annotated bibliography selects major book, newspaper, and magazine features and interviews; and reviews are also noted with appropriate productions in the previous chapters. Memorable Broadway roles are illustrated with scenes from Streetcar, The Fourposter (with Hume Cronyn, 1951), Five Finger Exercise (1959), A Delicate Balance (with Cronyn, 1966), The Gin Game (1977), Rose (1981), and Foxfire (with Cronyn, 1982).

MILLY S. BARRANGER is Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Dramatic Art at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Executive Producer of PlayMakers Repertory Company. She is the author of numerous books and articles on theatre and drama, and is co-editor, with Alice M. Robinson and Vera Mowry Roberts, of Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary (Greenwood Press, 1989).