Peggy Ashcroft
Birthday: Born in 1907-12-22 in Croydon, Surrey, England, UK
Deathday: 1991-06-14
Dame Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft, DBE, (22 December 1907 - 14 June 1991) known professionally as Peggy Ashcroft, was an English actress whose career spanned more than sixty years. Born to a comfortable middle-class family, Ashcroft was determined from an early age to become an actress, despite parental opposition.
TV Credits
The Jewel in the Crown
Character: Barbie Batchelor
A sweeping drama about the ruling and ruled classes of World War II India, the story begins with an unjust arrest for rape. The consequences of this arrest echo throughout the series with questions of identity and personal responsibility being explored against a background of war and personal intrigue....
Edward and Mrs Simpson
Character: Queen Mary
While still the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII meets the married American socialite, Wallis Simpson. Their relationship causes furor in the palace and in parliament, especially when King George V dies, Mrs. Simpson gets divorced, and King Edward announces his intention to marry her....
The Wars of the Roses
Character: Queen Margaret
The Wars of the Roses was a 1963 theatrical adaptation of William Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy (1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI & Richard III), which deals with the conflict between the House of Lancaster & the House of York over the throne of England, a conflict known as the Wars of the Roses. The plays were adapted by John Barton, and directed by Barton himself & Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The plays were heavily politicized, with Barton and Hall allowing numer...
A Perfect Spy
Character: Miss Dubber
The life of British MI6 spy Magnus Pym, from his school days to his mysterious disappearance....
Playing Shakespeare
Character:
John Barton holds a master class in how to play Shakespeare, using members of the RSC doing scenes, sonnets, and commentary as prime examples....
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Character: Margaret - Crofter's Wife (archive footage) (uncredited)
A television anthology series hosted by Alfred Hitchcock featuring dramas, thrillers, and mysteries....
Great Performances
Character: Self
The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries....
Movie Credits
The 39 Steps
Character: The Crofter's Wife Margaret
Richard Hanney has a rude awakening when a glamorous female spy falls into his bed - with a knife in her back. Having a bit of trouble explaining it all to Scotland Yard, he heads for the hills of Scotland to try to clear his name by locating the spy ring known as The 39 Steps....
When the Wind Blows
Character: Hilda Bloggs (voice)
With the help of government-issued pamphlets, an elderly British couple build a shelter and prepare for an impending nuclear attack, unaware that times and the nature of war have changed from their romantic memories of World War II....
Murder by the Book
Character: Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie’s agents propose that it’s time for her to publish the manuscript she wrote thirty-five years earlier, a novel in which she finally kills off her most famous creation. And it’s not an entirely sad occasion. “That wretched little man,” she says. “He’s always been so much trouble. How is it Miss Marple has never upset me at all, not ever?” That night, who should appear at her doorstep but the wretched little man himself, Hercule Poirot? The great fictional detective and his creator...
The Nun's Story
Character: Mother Mathilde
After leaving a wealthy Belgian family to become a nun, Sister Luke struggles with her devotion to her vows during crisis, disappointment, and World War II....
The Pedestrian
Character: Lady Gray
When a German businessman causes a car accident with deadly consequences, the papers start digging into his past to find scandals. What they find causes him to reevaluate his own past during WW2 when he was in Greece....
A Passage to India
Character: Mrs. Moore
Set during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj, the story begins with the arrival in India of a British woman, Miss Adela Quested, who is joining her fiancé, a city magistrate named Ronny Heaslop. She and Ronny's mother, Mrs. Moore, befriend an Indian doctor, Aziz H. Ahmed....
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Character: Mrs. Greville
Recently divorced career woman Alex Greville begins a romantic relationship with glamorous mod artist Bob Elkin, fully aware that he's also intimately involved with middle-aged doctor Daniel Hirsh. For both Alex and Daniel, the younger man represents a break with their repressive pasts, and though both know that Bob is seeing both of them, neither is willing to let go of the youth and vitality he brings to their otherwise stable lives....
Secret Ceremony
Character: Hannah
A penniless woman meets a strange girl who insists she is her long-lost mother and becomes enmeshed in a web of deception, and perhaps madness....
The Cherry Orchard
Character: Madame Ranevsky
Madame Ranevsky and her daughter Anya return home from Paris to find that their beloved family estate and cherry orchard are to be auctioned off to pay debts. Lopahin, a former serf on the estate who is now a wealthy landowner, proposes razing the home and cherry orchard and dividing the estate into plots that could be leased at great profit. The family, however, continues to hold out hope that their beloved home can somehow be saved from destruction....
Caught on a Train
Character: Frau Messner
British playwright Stephen Poliakoff's comical teleplay investigates Europe's changing social landscape via three strangers who meet on a train. Peter (Michael Kitchen), an English businessman on an overnight trip through Europe, shares a compartment with a beautiful American woman, Lorraine (Wendy Raebeck). But Peter's hope for romance is soon dampened by Lorraine's xenophobia and the arrival of a haughty Viennese aristocrat (Peggy Ashcroft)....
Madame Sousatzka
Character: Lady Emily
In London, eccentric piano instructor Madame Sousatzka takes on a new prize protégé, Manek, a teenage Bengali immigrant who displays incredible talent. Manek forms a close bond with his teacher, but soon discovers that she expects her pupils to become disciplined in all areas of life, and not just behind the piano. As he struggles to meet the challenges, Manek must also deal with his mother, who vies with his teacher for his attention....
Joseph Andrews
Character: Lady Tattle
Lady Booby alias 'Belle', the lively wife of the fat landed squire Sir Thomas Booby, has a lusty eye on the attractive, intelligent villager Joseph Andrews, a Latin pupil and protégé of parson Adams, and makes him their footman. Joseph's heart belongs to a country girl, foundling Fanny Goodwill, but his masters take him on a fashionable trip to Bath, where the spoiled society comes mainly to see and be seen, but drowns in the famous Roman baths. When the all but grieving lady finds Joseph's Chri...
3 Into 2 Won't Go
Character: Belle
Steve Howard, a British sales executive living in Manchester, England, begins an affair with a young hitchhiker, Elle Patterson, to emotionally get away from his marriage to his wife Francis. But when Elle moves into a room in Steve and Francis's house, he must keep the true nature of his relationship with Elle under wraps at all costs....
Quiet Wedding
Character: Flower Lisle
A young couple become engaged, but enjoy a number of comedic aventures before their wedding day....
Britain Welcomes the President of India
Character:
An account of the state visit to Britain by the President of India, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in June 1963. In London he accompanied the Queen on a State drive, visited the Commonwealth Institute, attended a Guildhall luncheon and visited the country....
The Wars of the Roses
Character: Queen Margaret
A 1965 BBC adaptation of William Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy (1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI and Richard III), which deals with the conflict between the House of Lancaster and the House of York over the throne of England, a conflict known as the Wars of the Roses. It was based on the 1963 theatre adaptation by John Barton, and directed by Peter Hall for the Royal Shakespeare Company....
Edward & Mrs. Simpson
Character: Queen Mary
While still the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII meets the married American socialite, Wallis Simpson. Their relationship causes furor in the palace and in parliament, especially when King George V dies, Mrs. Simpson gets divorced, and King Edward announces his intentions to marry her....
Little Eyolf
Character: The Rat Wife
Alfred Allmers has spent his whole life writing a book on "responsibility," a luxury he can afford as a result of his marriage to the wealthy and beautiful Rita. However, much to Rita's annoyance, his attention isn't always undivided toward her, as Alfred shifts his focus between his book, their son Eyolf, and his half-sister Asta. As Allmers slowly feels trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, emotions and a painful past threaten to boil over into a terrible finale....
Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures
Character: Lady Gee
This lighthearted romp through Royal India presents a world of Maharajas, palaces, imperiled art objects, and the foreign collectors who will stop at nothing to possess them. Peggy Ashcroft and Larry Pine star as two rapacious art collectors who come to the decaying Art Deco palace of a young Maharaja (Victor Banerjee) to examine a legendary collection of Indian miniature paintings. While vying with each other to get the pictures away from the royal couple—nicknamed Georgie and Bonnie as childre...
She's Been Away
Character: Lillian Huckle
A woman who has been institutionalized for 60 years for the "crime" of not conforming to the 1920s image of what a proper young woman should be (in other words, she did what she wanted and didn't care what anyone else thought about it) is finally released to the custody of her family, consisting of her grand-nephew and his family. At first she keeps a self-imposed distance from the relatives, but she soon finds herself coming around to her nephew's wife, a free spirit who is under the thumb of h...
Cream in My Coffee
Character: Jean Wilsher
Past and present intertwine: An elderly couple returns to the hotel where they became close when they were young and flashbacks to the earlier visit reveal the origins of both their pleasures and problems. Somewhere between the past and the present, Dennis Potter attempted to find "the shape of a life, of two lives..."...
Rhodes of Africa
Character: Anna Carpenter
Rhodes of Africa is a 1936 British biographical film charting the life of Cecil Rhodes. It was directed by Berthold Viertel and starred Walter Huston, Oskar Homolka, Basil Sydney and Bernard Lee....
Tell Me Lies
Character:
Adapted and directed by Peter Brook from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘production-in-progress US’, this long-unseen agitprop drama-doc – shot in London in 1967 and released only briefly in the UK and New York at the height of the Vietnam War – remains both thought-provoking and disturbing. A theatrical and cinematic social comment on US intervention in Vietnam, Brook’s film also reveals a 1960s London where art, theatre and political protest actively collude and where a young Glenda Jackson a...
Channel Incident
Character: The Woman
During the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940, a young woman takes her motorboat to join the flotilla to rescue soldiers and also to search for her husband, a British soldier who was fighting in France and who may be among the troops waiting to be rescued....
The Wandering Jew
Character: Olalla Quintana (Phase IV)
Old Jerusalem: Matathias, spiteful over his lover's illness, spits on Jesus along the road to Calvary, and is cursed to live endlessly until His return. The Crusades, 1150: Matathias, now an anonymous knight, competes for glory in combat and for the wife of a soldier. Palermo, 1290: Matteos Battadios witnesses the death of his young son, leading to conflict with his wife over whether to take comfort in Christianity. Seville, 1560: Dr Matteos Battadios dedicates himself to the treatment and co...
October Revolution
Character: Self (narrator)
French director Frederic Rossif presents this historical documentary that coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Stock footage from both World Wars are included with 30 minutes of new scenes filmed especially for the project. The historical timeline is traced from the time Czar Nicholas II is crowned. The emergence of Lenin, his death in 1924, and the later contributions of Trotsky and Stalin give the viewer a sense of death, betrayal, and ideological devotion to the comm...
The Heat of the Day
Character: Nettie
In World War II England, a woman is approached by a man claiming to work as an intelligence agent who has found out her lover is a spy. He promises to not arrest him if she'll have a relationship with him....
Terminus
Character: Mother (uncredited)
This fly on the wall-style documentary from 1961 won an Oscar for best documentary, and shows the changing patterns of human emotions during 24 hours in the life of Waterloo Station....
The Wind and the Bomb
Character:
The making-of When the Wind Blows, featuring interviews with producer John Coates, director Jimmy T. Murakami and writer Raymond Briggs...