Geraldine McEwan

Geraldine McEwan was a British actress best known for her stage roles who has also made the occasional foray into film and television. Born and raised in Windsor, she began her acting career as a teenager and gradually made her way through various repertory companies to land in the mid-1950s at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. After joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, McEwan distinguished herself in such roles as Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Ophelia in "Hamlet." Over the course of the next three decades, the actress amassed a formidable array of credits, originating roles in such contemporary classics as Joe Orton's "Loot" (1965) and tackling many of the classics like "The School for Scandal" (her Broadway debut in 1963), "The Rivals" (in 1983) and more recently, the absurdist "The Chairs" (a return to Broadway in 1998).

McEwan has made only a handful of feature appearances including starring opposite Laurence Olivier in Strindberg's "The Dance of Death" (1968). She was suitably aristocratic in the uneven comedy "Foreign Body" (1986) and provided an amusing turn as the maid teaching English to the French queen (Emma Thompson) in Kenneth Branagh's stirring remake of "Henry V" (1989). More recently, she won plaudits as the town eccentric in "The Love Letter" (1999). Her small screen roles have allowed McEwan better showcases for her talents. She dominated the Scottish miniseries version of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (shown on PBS in 1979), all but erasing memories of Maggie Smith's Oscar-winning bravura performance. McEwan did battle with Prunella Scales as social rivals in the amusing London Weekly Television miniseries "Mapp & Lucia" (1985-86). Among her other notable small screen appearances was her strong turn as the deeply religious mother of a lesbian in the BBC miniseries "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" (1990).