Dame Peggy Ashcroft was a celebrated actress who starred in iconic stage productions and films. She is commemorated with a blue plaque at her birthplace, 1A Tirlemont Road, Croydon.

Early life

Edith Margaret ‘Peggy’ Emily Ashcroft was born at 1A Tirlemont Road in Croydon on 22 December 1907. She was the second child of William Worsley Ashcroft, a land agent and surveyor, and Violetta Maud, née Bernheim, who was of German-Jewish and Danish heritage. She grew up with her brother Teddy and attended Woodford School. 

Ashcroft discovered a love for literature at an early age. Aged seven, she learned Alfred Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott by heart and immersed herself in Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. She was encouraged to read widely by her mother, who was an amateur actress.

After her father’s death during the First World War, Ashcroft spent her teenage years just a couple of roads away from the house where she was born. She had fond memories of growing up in what was then a leafy market town, ‘remembering it as what I call John Betjeman land reminding one of those leafy descriptions he has of churches and little woods with primroses and bluebells’.

During this time, Ashcroft developed her love for theatre. In the early 1920s, she was ‘entranced’ by Ralph Richardson’s performances of Henry V and Mark Antony at the Grand Theatre in Croydon. Her teacher, Gwen Lally, produced annual Shakespeare productions, in which Peggy took the leading roles of Cassius and Portia. At the age of 13, while standing outside the grocer’s shop in George Street, she determined to become an actress.

Early career

After training alongside Laurence Olivier at the Central School of Speech and Drama at the Royal Albert Hall, Ashcroft’s first professional role was opposite Ralph Richardson in Dear Brutus in May 1926.

In 1930, Ashcroft secured her first Shakespearean role in London and was admired as Desdemona to Paul Robeson’s Othello at the Savoy Theatre. Ashcroft was shocked by the racism Robeson encountered and later described how ‘it put the significance of race straight in front of me and I made my choice of where I stood’. She also embarked on an affair with Robeson and her first marriage, to the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, ended soon after.

In the early 1930s, Ashcroft worked with the avant-garde Russian director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, whose work deeply influenced her and who became her second husband. She was then invited to join the Old Vic company in 1932.

In 1935, Ashcroft was hailed as the ‘Finest Juliet of Our Time’ while playing opposite John Gielgud and Olivier, who alternated in the roles of Romeo and Mercutio. The role brought her artistic and financial success and she even found time to make a cameo appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In 1936 Ashcroft acted in Komisarjevsky’s production of The Seagull. The role of Nina challenged her to create one of her most moving performances.

Height of career

After working in New York in the mid-1930s, Ashcroft returned to the UK. While on tour with Clemence Dane’s Cousin Muriel, she had ‘something of a whirlwind romance’, with barrister Jeremy Hutchinson. They married in 1940 and had two children, Eliza and Nicholas. For much of the war, Ashcroft largely retreated from acting to concentrate on motherhood.

Peggy Ashcroft was at the height of her career during the 1950s and received various awards and accolades. In 1956, she was appointed a Dame.

Ashcroft was invited to be of the founding members of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford two years later. Her involvement was crucial to its success. Director Peter Hall stated ‘The creation of the RSC owes a great deal to her presence. Not just because of the superlative work she did but because of her moral example.’ Ashcroft’s appearance as Margaret of Anjou in the Company’s historical epic War of the Roses was viewed as a monumental performance.

In 1962 Ashcroft was invited to open the newly built theatre in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls arts complex, which was named after her.

Over the next decade she took on more television work and took on a mixture of classical roles by Chekhov and Ibsen, as well as new parts in plays by Beckett and Albee.

Later life

Later in her career, Ashcroft performed three celebrated screen roles: Frau Messner in Stephen Poliakoff’s Caught on a Train (1980), as Mrs Moore in David Lean’s film of EM Forster’s A Passage to India (1984) and as Barbie Batchelor in Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1984). Ashcroft won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her performance as Mrs Moore but was unable to attend the ceremony due to ill-health.

Ashcroft’s fellow actors celebrated her career in a gala at the Old Vic in December 1987. In 1991, Ashcroft suffered a stroke after returning from a trip to Canada to visit her son. She died in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead on 14 June 1991, aged 83.