Talk:Joyce Redman

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Birth Year many sourses most reliable list BOTH 1915 and 1918 as her actual year of birth, what could be proven as the correct one — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.234.60.33 (talk) 03:30, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

The 1915 date is correct. This is confirmed by her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which cites her birth and death certificates), pasted below:

Redman, Joyce Olivia (1915–2012), actress, was born on 7 December 1915 at 15 Osborne Terrace, Gosforth, Northumberland, one of four daughters of Sydney George Redman, a consultant engineer then serving as a major in the Northumberland Fusiliers, and his Irish wife, Marie Edith, née McCormick. Growing up on Bartragh Island in Killala Bay, off the coast of co. Mayo, Ireland, she was educated privately by governesses before training for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her first West End appearance was as First Tiger Lily in Alice Through the Looking Glass (1935), after which she became a regular on the London stage and in club theatres. Her breakthrough role was the saint–child Brigit in Paul Vincent Carroll's Shadow and Substance (1943), prompting the critic Audrey Williamson to observe that ‘the simplicity of this actress was extraordinarily touching’ (Theatre of Two Decades, 1951, 191).

Just over five feet tall, red-haired, and vivacious, with pale skin, large blue eyes, and a commandingly husky voice which never lost its Irish inflections, Redman joined the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre in 1944, playing Solveig in Ibsen's Peer Gynt with Ralph Richardson, Lady Anne in Richard III opposite Laurence Olivier, and Louka in Shaw's Arms and the Man and Sonya in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya alongside both actors. Terrified of working with them—‘We called them Sir, and to me they were gods’ (Croall, 337)—she was determined to resign before the plays opened, but Sybil Thorndike persuaded her to stay. In 1945 she toured with the company in war-devastated Europe, playing in major theatres including the Comédie Française in Paris. She visited the newly liberated Belsen concentration camp, where the company staged Arms and the Man for the doctors and nurses: ‘It was so terrible, I couldn't believe what humans could do to each other’, she recalled late in life (ibid., 349). Her subsequent Old Vic roles included a gin-soaked Doll Tearsheet alongside Richardson's Falstaff in Henry IV Part II—one critic called her ‘one of the O'Tearsheets’ (cited in The Times, 14 May 2012)—and a raddled Dol Common in Jonson's The Alchemist, described by the critic W. A. Darlington as ‘a funny little spitfire clown’. Her Cordelia in Olivier's King Lear (1946) had, according to one critic, ‘that sunlit, golden joyousness one feels behind all of this actress's work—even behind the mist of her tears’ (cited in Daily Telegraph, 14 May 2012).

For the next decade or so Redman divided her time between the West End and Broadway. In London she played the young wife in Sartre's political thriller Crime Passionel (1948). She attracted rave reviews the same year on Broadway as a proto-feminist Anne Boleyn in Maxwell Anderson's Anne of a Thousand Days: the critic Brooks Atkinson described her as ‘fiery, imperious and valiant’, adding that she ‘scorches the pages’ of the script ‘to the point where the play is not a good fire-insurance risk’ (New York Times, 18 Sept 1949). While in New York in 1949 she married Charles Ivor Wynne-Roberts (1916–1992), a former army captain and later a television executive, with whom she had three children. In the same year she bought Bartragh Island, which had been in the family for generations (she eventually sold it in 1984).

Back in London, Peter Brook directed Redman in The Little Hut by André Roussin, and in the title role in Anouilh's Colombe (1951). In 1955 she played a season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, appearing as Helena in All's Well that Ends Well and Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor; later she was Titania in the Old Vic's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1957). In 1964 she played the wife to Trevor Howard's Captain in Strindberg's The Father. That year she joined Olivier's newly formed National Theatre Company at the Old Vic, where she demonstrated her versatility: her major roles included Desdemona's servant Emilia in Othello, Goodwife Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible (a critic wrote of her ‘quiet magnificence’: cited in (The Times, 14 May 2012)), Mrs Frail in Congreve's Restoration comedy Love for Love (she was ‘a tiny galleon in full sail’), and a heartbreaking Juno Boyle in Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. She also visited Moscow and Berlin with Othello and Love for Love.

Redman was back at the National in 1979, appearing in Stoppard's version of Schnitzler's Undiscovered Country, and playing the wife of landowner Ralph Richardson in Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment. After a brief spell with Anthony Quayle's touring company Compass, during which she appeared in Garrick and Colman the Elder's The Clandestine Marriage (1984), she returned to Broadway as Mrs Higgins, mother to Peter O'Toole's professor, in Shaw's Pygmalion (1987). Her final appearances at the National were as the Duchess of York in Richard III (1990), which toured the world, and as the senile Esme in David Hare's Amy's View (1997).

Redman appeared in only a handful of films, making her screen début as a maid in Spellbound (1941), then taking a small role in Powell and Pressburger's wartime propaganda film One of our Aircraft is Missing (1942). She was best-known for a lascivious eating scene in Tom Jones (1963), in which she played the tavern's servant Mrs Waters: she and Albert Finney as Tom suggestively tucked into a succulent feast of oysters, chicken legs, and pears before rushing off to bed. Her performance gained her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, as did her playing of Emilia in the film version of the Olivier Othello (1965), for which she also won a Golden Globe nomination. Her final film was the birth-control comedy Prudence and the Pill (1968). Her television films included a ‘seductive’ Lady Macbeth for American television (1949), Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1955), Thackeray's Vanity Fair (as Becky Sharp, 1957), Nell Gwyn in Shaw's In Good King Charles' Golden Days (1970), Auntie Hamps in Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger (1976), and Magliore in Les Misérables (1978). She made her final television appearance at the age of eighty-six as the elderly queen in Victoria and Albert (2001).

Redman spent her final years living at Iden Green, in the Kent countryside, near Benenden. Following a short illness she died of pneumonia at Tunbridge Wells Hospital in Pembury, Kent, on 9 May 2012, two days after her twin sister Rosalind's death. She was buried in Faversham and was survived by her three children.

Jonathan Croall

Sources J. Croall, Sybil Thorndike: a star of life (2008) · The Guardian (12 May 2012) · Daily Telegraph (14 May 2012) · The Times (14 May 2012) · New York Times (15 May 2012) · Western People [co. Mayo] (16 May 2012) · The Independent (18 May 2012) · The Herald [Glasgow] (25 May 2012) · Who was who in the theatre, 1912–1976, 4 vols. (1978) · B. McFarlane, The encyclopedia of British film, 4th edn (2013) · personal knowledge (2016) · b. cert. · d. cert.

Archives FILM BFI NFTVA, performance footage SOUND BL NSA, performance recording Likenesses C. Beaton, bromide print on white card mount, 1943?, NPG · photographs, 1945–6, Getty Images · photographs, 1954–67, PA Images, London · photographs, 1955–80, Rex Features, London · A. Buckley, modern bromide print from original negative, 1956, NPG · obituary photographs Wealth at death £468,022: probate, 17 Jan 2013, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Crisso (talk) 14:38, 15 August 2017 (UTC)