Irene Worth
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Irene Worth | |
---|---|
Born | Harriett Elizabeth Abrams June 23, 1916 Fairbury, Nebraska, U.S. |
Died | March 10, 2002 New York City, U.S. | (aged 85)
Alma mater | Royal Central School of Speech and Drama |
Years active | 1943–2001 |
Irene Worth,
Worth made her Broadway debut in 1943, joined the Old Vic company in 1951 and the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. She won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress for the 1958 film Orders to Kill. Her other film appearances included Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Deathtrap (1982). A three-time Tony Award winner, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Tiny Alice in 1965 and Sweet Bird of Youth in 1976, and won the 1991 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Lost in Yonkers, a role she reprised in the 1993 film version. One of her later stage performances was opposite Paul Scofield in the 2001 production of I Take Your Hand in Mine at the Almeida Theatre in London.
Early life
Harriett Elizabeth Abrams was born in
Career
Shakespeare and the West End
She joined the
In 1953, she joined the fledgling
She returned to London in
In the 1950s, Worth demonstrated her exceptional versatility by playing in the farce Hotel Paradiso in London with Alec Guinness, high tragedy in the title role of Schiller's Mary Stuart, co-starring Eva Le Gallienne, and on Broadway and Shakespearean comedy in As You Like It at Stratford, Ontario. In Ivor Brown's play William's Other Anne, she played Shakespeare's first girlfriend Anne Whateley opposite John Gregson as Shakespeare.
She also made a number of well-regarded appearances in British films of the period, most notably her powerful performance as a French Resistance agent in Anthony Asquith's 1958 wartime espionage drama Orders to Kill, which earned her the BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actress.
The RSC, the National Theatre and Greenwich
In 1962, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, and it was there that she gave some of her great performances. She was Goneril to Paul Scofield's Lear in Peter Brook's acclaimed King Lear, the first of many collaborations with Brook. She recreated her implacable Goneril in the stark, black-and-white film version of this production.
She repeated her Lady Macbeth and appeared again for Brook in
She returned to the RSC at the Aldwych to repeat her role. She worked with Peter Brook in Paris and toured Iran with Orghast, Brook's attempt to develop an international theatre language. She joined the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1968 to play Jocasta in Peter Brook's production of Seneca's Oedipus, opposite Gielgud. She appeared with Sir Noël Coward's in his trilogy, Suite in Three Keys, in which he made his last on-stage appearance.
In 1974, she appeared in three thematically linked plays at the Greenwich Theatre directed by Jonathan Miller under the umbrella title of Family Romances and using the same actors for each play. Worth took the roles of Gertrude in Hamlet, Madame Arkadina in Chekhov's The Seagull, and Mrs Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts.
America
Worth spent most of the 1970s in North America. She was an acclaimed Hedda Gabler at Stratford, Ontario, a role she considered one of her more satisfying achievements and which prompted Walter Kerr to write in The New York Times "Miss Worth is just possibly the best actress in the world."
She played Princess Kosmonopolis in
Worth also appeared in the premiere of
The later years
She starred as the goddess Athena in The
In 1984, Sir
She was seen in Sir
In 1991, she won a third Tony for her performance as the tough-as-nails Grandma Kurnitz in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers, and later appeared in the film version along with Richard Dreyfuss and Mercedes Ruehl.
In 1999, she appeared in the film Onegin. As she was about to begin preview performances in a Broadway revival of Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon, Worth had a stroke and never appeared in the production. She continued to act, and in September 2001, one of her later appearances was with Paul Scofield at the Almeida Theatre in the two-handed play I Take Your Hand in Mine, by Carol Rocamora based on the love letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper.
Recitals
During the mid-1960s in New York, Worth and Gielgud had collaborated in a series of dramatic readings, first from T.S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell and then from Shakespeare. It was a form of theatre at which she became more adept as she grew older, drawing from Virginia Woolf, Ivan Turgenev and Noël Coward. She referred to them as "her recitals".
In the mid-1990s, she devised and performed a two-hour monologue Portrait of Edith Wharton, based on Wharton's life and writings. Using no props, costumes or sets, she created characters entirely through vocal means.
Death and funeral
Worth died following a stroke in 2002, in New York's Roosevelt Hospital, at the age of 85.[3]
At her memorial service, held at
Awards
- The Lady from the Sea, 1953-54
- British Film Academy Award Best British Actress, Orders to Kill 1958
- Page One Award, Toys in the Attic 1960
- Tony Award for Best Actress (Dramatic), Tiny Alice 1965
- Evening Standard Award, Suite in Three Keys 1966
- Variety Club of Great Britain Award, Heartbreak House 1967
- Plays and Players London Theatre Critics Award Best Actress, Heartbreak House 1967
- Tony Award for Best Actress, Sweet Bird of Youth 1975-76
- Joseph Jefferson AwardBest Actress in a Play, Sweet Bird of Youth 1975-76
- Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress, The Cherry Orchard 1977
- OBIE Award, The Chalk Garden 1981-82
- Emmy Award, "Live From Lincoln Center: Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with Irene Worth and Horacio Gutiérrez" 1986
- OBIE Award, Sustained Achievement 1988-89
- Tony Award for Best Featured Actress, Lost in Yonkers 1991
- Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress, Lost in Yonkers 1991
Honors
Worth was awarded an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1975.[citation needed]
Filmography
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1948 | One Night with You | Lina Linari | Film debut |
Another Shore | Bucksie Vere-Brown | ||
1952 | Secret People | Miss Jackson | |
1958 | Orders to Kill | Léonie | |
1959 | The Scapegoat | Francoise | |
1962 | Seven Seas to Calais | Queen Elizabeth I | |
1963 | To Die in Madrid | Co-Narrator | Documentary |
1971 | King Lear |
Goneril | |
Nicholas and Alexandra | The Dowager Empress Marie Fedorovna | ||
1979 | Rich Kids | Madeline's Mother | |
1980 | Happy Days | Winnie | TV Movie |
1981 | Eyewitness | Mrs. Sokolow | |
1982 | Deathtrap | Helga ten Dorp | |
1983 | Separate Tables | Mrs. Railton-Bell | TV Movie |
1984 | The Tragedy of Coriolanus |
Volumnia | TV Movie |
Forbidden | Ruth Friedländer | ||
1985 | Fast Forward |
Ida Sabol | |
1989 | The Shell Seekers | Dolly Keeling | TV Movie |
1993 | Lost in Yonkers | Grandma Kurnitz | |
1998 | Just the Ticket |
Mrs. Haywood | |
1999 | Onegin | Princess Alina | Final film role |
References
- ^ a b "Irene Worth Memorial". The New York Times. 2002-05-29. p. B-7. Archived from the original on 2023-06-23. Retrieved 2011-07-05.
- ^ .
- ^ a b Shirley, Don (March 13, 2002). "Irene Worth, 85; Actress Was 3-Time Tony Winner". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on August 5, 2020. Retrieved 2011-08-16.
- ISBN 978-1-59339-292-5. Retrieved 2023-08-23.
External links
- Irene Worth at the Internet Broadway Database
- Irene Worth at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- Irene Worth at IMDb