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The Times (12/Sep/1994) - American theatre loses grand old lady: Jessica Tandy

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American theatre loses grand old lady: Jessica Tandy

It is always simpler for actors who do only one thing in one place to be recognised as stars. It was not so much her versatility that impeded Jessica Tandy, who died yesterday, as the fact that there were so many different strands to her professional life. Only those who saw her regularly on the American stage could hope to get the measure of her, and even they were surprised when suddenly Driving Miss Daisy made her an institution.

At first glance it seemed like an odd place for her to end up. After all, the most famous role she had previously played was Blanche DuBois in the first production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was far from ensuring that when her most famous vehicle was filmed she would get the role. If it did not happen to Tallulah Bankhead or Ethel Merman, it certainly was not going to happen to Jessica Tandy not when Vivien Leigh was waiting in the wings.

Luckily, as well as being a stage star in her own right, Miss Tandy was half of a team. Never so famous as the legendary Lunts, she and her husband, Hume Cronyn, very nearly equalled them as the years went by. So often plays called for married talents, and once the first flush of youth was gone, films increasingly needed Darby-and-Joan pairings.

Indeed, the Cronyns seemed to gain in force as they grew older; they appeared somewhere near the centre of many films, playing that nice old couple round the corner, or those sinister old people who remained suspiciously hale and hearty while everyone else faints and fails. It is all too easy for individual talents to get submerged in these cosy collaborations. Sometimes Miss Tandy's did. Even in 1963, when she turns up as Tippi Hedren's mother in Hitchcock's epic of ornithological revolt, The Birds, it was a trivial pursuit sort of inquiry expecting the answer "No, really!" to ask how many realised that the understandably distraught elderly lady had in fact been the first Blanche DuBois. Driving Miss Daisy changed all that.

Miss Tandy, who was born in London, had always been famed for her natural authority and crisp diction as well as her power to move audiences. The dictatorial old lady who does the unimaginable by actually befriending her black chauffeur and, against all her traditional codes, recognising him as her equal in many and superior in some things, offered a perfect opportunity for her to show what she could do on her own account, and she took it triumphantly.

A long way from Blanche DuBois perhaps, but Tennessee Williams always said that Blanche was a survivor and soon after the play was over would have got everything together, married her gentleman caller and settled down.