Margaret Tyzack

Margaret Maud Tyzack (9 September 193125 June 2011) was an English actress. Her television roles included The Forsyte Saga (1967) I, Claudius (1976), and George Lucas's Young Indiana Jones (1992–1993). She won the 1970 BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the BBC serial The First Churchills, and the 1990 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Lettice and Lovage, opposite Maggie Smith. She also won two Olivier Awards—in 1981 as Actress of the Year in a Revival and in 2009 as Best Actress in a Play. Her film appearances included 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and Match Point (2005). Early life Tyzack was born in Essex, England, the daughter of Doris (née Moseley) and Thomas Edward Tyzack. She grew up in Plaistow, West Ham (now Greater London). She attended the all-girls' St Angela's Ursuline School, Newham, and was a graduate of RADA. Career Tyzack was noted for her classical stage roles, having joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Vassilissa in Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths in 1962, and had major roles in their 1972 Roman Season as Volumnia in Coriolanus, Portia in Julius Caesar and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. She appeared in another Gorky play, as Maria Lvovna in Summerfolk RSC 1974. In 1977 she joined the acting company of the Stratford Festival in Canada, where she played Mrs Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, Queen Margaret in Richard III and the Countess of Roussillon in All's Well That Ends Well. In a feature of Stratford's 1977 season, New York Times writer Richard Eder noted "One of the main excitements was the discovery of Margaret Tyzack [...] her work here has been a revelation". Tyzack had been engaged on short notice by the Festival when Canadian actress Kate Reid dropped out, which initially spurred some protests from Canadian nationalists. Theatre critic Robert Cushman later wrote that had the protests succeeded "Canadian audiences would have been deprived of three great performances", noting of her performance in Richard III, "there can never have been a better (Queen) Margaret". She played the Countess role again for the Royal Shakespeare Company on Broadway in 1983. She received her first Olivier award as Actress of the Year in a Revival in 1981 for the National Theatre revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which she played Martha, replacing Joan Plowright who was ill.