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Toronto Star (22/Apr/1990) - 'Lady Macbeth' taking it easy at 92

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'Lady Macbeth' taking it easy at 92

Judith Anderson's garden, on a hill overlooking Santa Barbara, Calif., is a bit unkempt these days.

"I can't do as much (gardening) as I used to," she laments.

That's hardly surprising, for Dame Judith Anderson is 92. She's taking it easy these days, but insists she hasn't retired from the acting career that began 'way back in 1915 in her native Australia.

To prove that's she can still keep an audience enthralled she appeared the other day at a charity performance in a Santa Barbara theatre.

"The 5-foot 4 Anderson commanded the stage," one critic observed. "Her voice boomed, raced and then trembled as called for by the lines. Tears streaked down her face as she read from Macbeth."

That was fitting, for Anderson has made the role of the power-lusting Lady Macbeth her own, especially in two shattering incarnations of the part on the stage (1937 and 1941.)

Filmgoers probably remember her best from Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) — she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers — or from Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958), in which she played Big Mama to Burl Ives' Big Daddy.

'Spoken of with awe'

But the stage was always her first love. She was Frances Margaret Anderson of Adelaide when she first trod the boards at 17 in Sydney, but by the time she arrived in America a couple of years later she was Judith Anderson.

In the years that followed she was Queen Gertrude to John Gielgud's Hamlet, Lady Macbeth to Laurence Olivier's Macbeth, Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra, Medea in Medea, Nina Leeds in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude — "all classic performances still spoken of with awe," as one critic observes.

But she made one monumental mistake when she consented to take the title role in a tour of Hamlet in 1970. "A great many actresses have played Hamlet, about 10 I think," she said later, "but critics don't like women playing it."

They certainly didn't like that version. The reviews were universally bad and when the tour was over she holed up in her Santa Barbara home, and indulged herself in gardening for months, to recover.

But soon she was back in films (A Man Called Horse, Inn Of The Damned) and the theatre. In the early '80s she gave it all up for a while, then started feeling pangs of guilt.

"I was rotting away in my own selfish way, doing what I wanted to do, sleeping when I wanted to sleep, getting up when I wanted to get up," she told Starweek correspondent Eirik Knutzen at that time. Then she realized "I should be using my years creatively."

And that's how she came into television. For years she played Minx Lockridge, matriarch of one of the four families featured in the daytime serial (Anderson hates the expression "soap opera") Santa Barbara.

Even though the series was supposedly set in her adopted hometown, Anderson says she didn't know any of the people and situations from which the writers drew their inspiration. "I don't know any scandalous people up here and know nothing of such intrigues," she confessed.

Actually, Santa Barbara was a return to TV for Anderson. She won two Emmy awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth on television in 1954 and '56.

Luck and talent

She was still just Judith Anderson at that time. The "Dame" title — the female equivalent of a knighthood — came later, in 1960. She was the first Australian artist to be so elevated since opera star Dame Nellie Melba received the title in 1918.

To what does Anderson attribute her longevity in a tough business like acting? "Pure luck," she has said. "Luck and a little talent. You can't do without talent but I'm convinced that luck has an awful lot to do with it. There is so much wonderful talent out there which is unknown and unsung because they weren't in the right place at the right time."

She admits that even after facing audiences for 75 years she's still nervous before a performance, even that charity performance in her hometown, where everyone was on her side. "I thought I'd read a little Macbeth and Hamlet and it wouldn't be so bad," she said after the performance. "But oh dear, it is..."

Anderson shares her home with a dog and a cat, "who rule my life." She was twice married — in the late '30s and the late '40s — but both attempts were, she says, "disasters."

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