Zoe Caldwell, who has died aged 86 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was one of the leading classical stage actors of the last century and won four Tony awards on Broadway, for her performances in Slapstick Tragedy, by Tennessee Williams (1966), and as Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie (1968), Euripides’ Medea (1982) and Terrence McNally’s Maria Callas in Master Class (1995). Her career was spread across three continents, so her reputation for the ferocity and musical intensity of her acting – she was a small woman with a large voice and gutsy physical presence – never grew to the proportions it merited.
She went to Stratford-upon-Avon for the last two seasons before Peter Hall launched the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961 and appeared as Bianca to Paul Robeson’s Othello, Cordelia to Charles Laughton’s King Lear, and with Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans in Coriolanus.
But she counted the “cornerstone” season as her 1967 stint at the other Stratford, in Ontario, Canada, when she played Lady Anne opposite Alan Bates’s smirking Richard III and a famous Cleopatra with Christopher Plummer, directed by Michael Langham. As the queen of old Nile, she hennaed the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, covered herself in tawny make-up, oils and perfumes, and went bare-breasted to her destiny.
On either side of that season she won her first and second Tony awards in New York, and married (in 1968) the producer Robert Whitehead, who cast her as Jean Brodie.
Zoe, always pronounced as one syllable, wanted to go on the stage from infancy. She was born in Hawthorn, Victoria, and raised in the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn. Her father, Edgar Caldwell (whose own father’s home town was Bolton, Lancashire), was a plumber and gas fitter, and her mother, Zoe (nee Hivon), the eldest of 13 in an Irish Catholic family, was a taxi dancer at the local ballroom.
Caldwell appeared in a grass skirt in her first concert at the age of two years and 10 months and, after taking dance and elocution classes, made a professional debut aged nine as one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan at the Tivoli in Melbourne. As a child actor she appeared in radio serials and amateur theatre, later working in a vegetable and fruit pickling factory and as a cinema usher.
She was educated at the Methodist Ladies’ college in Melbourne. In 1953, she joined the first professional fortnightly rep company in Australia, the Union Theatre repertory company (now the Melbourne Theatre company), and toured with them throughout Victoria, playing Eliza in Pygmalion, for five months.
Barry Humphries joined the company on the theatre’s second tour, playing Orsino in Twelfth Night, with Zoe playing Viola. Humphries told her about a revue character he was devising called Dame Edna Everage and Zoe shocked him by suggesting he play Edna himself.
Also in Twelfth Night was Ray Lawler, who became a lifelong friend and went on to write the first great modern Australian play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, in which Caldwell played Bubba Ryan on tour.
The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust was formed in the mid-1950s in Sydney to celebrate the visit of the young Queen Elizabeth, and the company opened with Medea in Canberra, Judith Anderson playing the title role and Caldwell, who would later make that role her own, the second woman of Corinth. On the trust’s third tour, she played Miss Hoyden in John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and Ophelia to Paul Rogers’ Hamlet.
Crucially for Caldwell, the manager of this tour was Elsie Beyer, an associate of the producing management HM Tennent in London, and she arranged a contract with Glen Byam Shaw, the director of the 1958 season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Caldwell played small parts, including a Mycenian prostitute (alongside Eileen Atkins) in Pericles.
Before returning for the 1959 season at Stratford, she toured with the Michael Redgrave Hamlet to Russia, the trip memorialised in Alan Bennett’s television play An Englishman Abroad, about Coral Browne (who was playing Gertrude) meeting Guy Burgess. A young Albert Finney understudied Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus (as well as playing Cassio in the Paul Robeson Othello) and he and Caldwell embarked on “an explosive affair, causing havoc and pain”, which she later regretted; she was cited in Finney’s divorce from his first wife, the actor Jane Wenham.
Caldwell thought Laughton had insufficient stamina for Lear, but she adored playing Helena in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, with Edith Evans as the Countess: “I never had such an easy time with a part. It’s a difficult play, but Tony Guthrie cut a path through the forest and all we had to do was follow it.”
Less happily, she played a season at the Royal Court, making a London debut in 1960 in Christopher Logue’s Trials by Logue, directed by Lindsay Anderson, followed by appearances in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, directed by Tony Richardson, and in Eugène Ionesco’s Jacques. She never understood it and didn’t think the author – whom she described as fat, small and drunk – did, either.
She felt that she was going out of style as a classical actor, and so sought a rebirth in Stratford, Ontario; Langham handed her a lifeline with Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost. She played Lady Macbeth opposite Sean Connery for Canadian television (Connery then went off to make his first Bond movie) and completed what she called “a transformation” in 1961 as Pegeen Mike in John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in Winnipeg.
She returned to Australia as Saint Joan at the second Adelaide festival in 1962, and the same year, also in Adelaide, scored a huge success as Nola Boyle, a slatternly wife of an agricultural worker who has an affair with his best friend, in Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla.
Major performances followed in 1965, as Millamant in William Congreve’s The Way of the World and Grusha in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, both at the Guthrie theatre in Minneapolis. There she met and befriended Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, as well as their best friend, the newly widowed Whitehead.
In 1965 Caldwell made her debut on Broadway, replacing Anne Bancroft for three weeks as Jeanne, in John Whiting’s The Devils, opposite Jason Robards as Grandier, the libertine priest.
She only once returned to London, to play Lady Hamilton in Terence Rattigan’s A Bequest to the Nation (1970), with Ian Holm as Horatio Nelson, in what was a frankly disappointing bed-chamber conversation piece before and after the Battle of Trafalgar. Back on Broadway, she had not much more luck with Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and, despite winning those two later Tonys for Medea and Master Class, she began to move to the other side of the footlights as a director.
In 1981, she directed James Earl Jones as Othello, Plummer as Iago and Dianne Wiest as Desdemona at the Winter Garden in New York. This success led to an appointment in charge of two summer seasons at the American Shakespeare theatre in Connecticut in the mid-1980s, and another gig as Shakespeare director, again with Plummer, and with Glenda Jackson, for Macbeth on Broadway (1988).
In 1995, she directed the New York premiere of Atkins’s riveting epistolary play Vita and Virginia, with Atkins as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Redgrave as Vita Sackville-West.
Some of her greatest performances, including the Medea, were preserved on television, and other notable appearances include a performance as Sarah Bernhardt for CBC and as Arkadina in The Seagull for BBC TV, both in the late 70s. While Whitehead remained busy as a Broadway producer, Caldwell balanced her career with raising their sons.
Her movie portfolio is regrettably thin, but she played an imperious dowager in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and popped up in the romantic comedy Just a Kiss (2002). After Jonathan Glazer’s weirdly compelling Birth (2004), in which Nicole Kidman believes her dead husband has been reincarnated as a young boy, came the not entirely dissimilar Stephen Daldry film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), in which she played the grandmother of a boy searching for signs of his dead father in the wake of 9/11.
Caldwell wrote a highly readable early autobiography, I Will Be Cleopatra (2001). She was appointed OBE in 1970.
Robert died in 2002. Caldwell is survived by their sons, Sam and Charles, and by two grandchildren.
• Zoe Ada Caldwell, actor and director, born 14 September 1933; died 16 February 2020
• This article was amended on 20 February 2020. It originally implied that Caldwell used the name Zoe in preference to her given name of Ada, but her full name at birth was Zoe Ada Caldwell.
