Zoe
Caldwell – actress, director
Born
September 14, 1933; died February 16, 2020
Zoe
Caldwell, who has died aged 86, was a major classical actress, who played a stream
of powerful women across three continents. Her work took her from her native
Australia to the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK, and to America, where she
won four Tony awards. Her second saw her named best actress in the title role
of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), Jay Presson Allen’s stage version of
Muriel Spark’s iconic Edinburgh-set novel about a mercurial school-mistress. Caldwell
took over from Vanessa Redgrave in a production directed by Canadian-born Robert
Whitehead, who Caldwell married.
Caldwell’s
first Tony win came two-years earlier for Tennessee Williams’ Slapstick
Tragedy. Her other two followed later, in another title role as Medea (1982),
and as operatic diva Maria Callas in Terence McNally’s solo play, Master Class
(1996). At Stratford she was Bianca to Paul Robeson’s Othello and Cordelia to
Charles Laughton’s Lear. She appeared as Bianca opposite Edith Evans in All’s
Well that Ends well, and alongside Laurence Olivier in Coriolanus. Caldwell’s
fellow ingénues in the RSC company included Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Albert
Finney, with whom she had an affair.
In
America, Caldwell played Ophelia in Hamlet and Natasha in Chekhov’s Three
Sisters at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. In 1967 at Stratford, Ontario, Canada, she was Lady
Anne opposite Alan Bates’s Richard III, and made a
fearless queen of the Nile in Antony and Cleopatra. Caldwell also appeared
in a Canadian TV film of Macbeth (1961), playing Lady M opposite Sean Connery
as her equally doomed husband.
As
a director, Caldwell oversaw James Earl Jones in Othello (1981) at the Winter Garden in New York.
She was invited to run the American Shakespeare Theatre in
Connecticut for two seasons, and directed Christopher Plummer and Glenda
Jackson on Broadway in Macbeth (1988). Caldwell later directed Eileen Atkins
and Vanessa Redgrave in Vita and Virginia (1995), a play devised by Atkins
based on the letters between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Caldwell’s
formidable demeanour on and off stage saw her lead from the front.
Zoe
Ada Caldwell was born in Hawthorne, Victoria,
and raised in Balwyn, a suburb of Melbourne. Her plumber father Edgar was originally
from Bolton, Lancashire, and her mother Zoe (nee Hivon), a taxi dancer in a
local ballroom. Caldwell was only two when she appeared in a grass skirt in a
concert, and, after taking dance and elocution lessons, made her professional
debut aged nine as one of the Lost Boys in a production of Peter Pan. As a
child, she also worked on radio and in amateur theatre.
After graduating from the Methodist
Ladies’ college in Melbourne, in 1953, Caldwell joined the Union Theatre as
part of the first professional fortnightly repertory theatre company in
Australia. The company would later become the Melbourne Theatre company.
Caldwell toured as Eliza in Pygmalion, and played Viola in Twelfth Night
opposite Barry Humphries as Orsino. Humphries told Caldwell about a character
he was devising called Dame Edna Everage, who Caldwell suggested he should play
himself.
Caldwell joined The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, set up in
Sydney to celebrate the visit of Queen Elizabeth, and played Ophelia to Paul Rogers’
Hamlet. This led to Caldwell being offered a contact with Glen Byam Shaw, the
director of the 1958 season at Stratford-upon-Avon, where she played bit parts
before touring Russia with Michael Redgrave’s Hamlet.
Caldwell made her London debut at
the Royal Court in 1960 in Lindsay Anderson’s production of Christopher Logue’s
Trial by Logue, before appearing in Tony Richardson’s production of The
Changeling and Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist play, Jacques. In Canada, she played
Pegeen Mike in a 1961 production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
Returning to Australia, she
played Saint Joan at the second Adelaide Festival in 1962. By 1965 she was in
America, where she
played Millamant in Congreve’s
The Way of the World and Grusha in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, both in
Minneapolis, where she met Whitehead. Caldwell made her Broadway debut in 1965,
replacing Anne Bancroft for
three weeks in John Whiting’s play, The Devils. Back in London, Caldwell played
Lady Hamilton in Terence Rattigan’s A Bequest to the Nation (1970), the same
year she was awarded an OBE.
On television, she played Sarah
Bernhardt in Sarah (1971) and Madame Arkadina in The Seagull (1978). On film,
she appeared in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and a year later played
the title role of Lillian in William Mace’s play about Lillian Hellman.
Caldwell’s
autobiography, I Will be Cleopatra: An Actress’s Journey, was published in 2001.
Two years later, she appeared as a guest in The Right Size’s Morecambe and Wise
tribute, The Play What I Wrote, and provided voices for the TV cartoon, Lilo
and Stitch. In
2004, she appeared in Jonathan Glazer’s psych-horror, Birth (2004), with Nicole
Kidman, then in 2011 in Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
As had been the case for more than half a century, Caldwell remained a powerful
and imposing presence throughout.
She is survived by her two
sons, Sam and Charles, and two grand-children. Whitehead pre-deceased her in
2002.
The Herald, March 26th 2020
ends
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