Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 13, 1994 TAG: 9409140054
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RICHARD L. COE/THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For the film version of ``A Streetcar Named Desire,'' her stage creation, Blanche Dubois, was given to Vivien Leigh. Lady Olivier, as she then still was, was splendid and rightly won an Oscar for it (1951). But for all who saw the Tandy Blanche at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater in 1947 and for two years thereafter, Tandy was peerless. Not until 40 years later, when she was 80, did an Oscar come her way, for ``Driving Miss Daisy.'' Tandy died Sunday in Connecticut at age 85.
By wild chance Tandy's initial take on Blanche had been in Los Angeles two years earlier when a small set of New York's Group Theater emigres had linked up in a Hollywood performing group they called ``the Lab.'' To this informal institution came a short play by the author of ``The Glass Menagerie,'' Tennessee Williams, called ``Portrait of a Madonna.'' Actor-director Hume Cronyn was asked to stage it, and for the title part he chose his wife of three years, Jessica Tandy.
Hollywood's major figures were dazzled by Tandy's performance of a lonely spinster bedeviled by sexual fantasies. The part grew into Blanche and, though Williams had hoped for Lillian Gish, she was otherwise occupied, and director Elia Kazan chose Tandy for the part, a story told in Cronyn's memoir, ``A Terrible Liar.''
They were a gloriously theatrical couple - ``lesser Lunts,'' as Hume cracked at one time, referring to the older Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Two years younger than his English-born wife, Cronyn was a Canadian who made his early American stage appearances with Southwest Virginia's Barter Theatre.
I first saw Tandy on Washington's National Theatre stage in March 1942 opposite Paul Muni in ``Yesterday's Magic,'' a drama about a drunken actor. The young Tandy played Muni's club-footed daughter, and for years thereafter I always expected the offstage Tandy to limp.
What made her so remarkable an actress was that you always believed her, whatever the role. Her fragility as Blanche lives on in still photos when Stanley (Marlon Brando) picks her up to see the lines in the fading woman's face under that bare kitchen light. Yet she was anything but fragile as Gertrude to George Grizzard's Hamlet, when they opened the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1963.
That was the summer I got to know the offstage Cronyns when she doubled as housewife-cook in the Minneapolis house they took for their children. Christopher, Susan and Tandy were all there, part of every performance in the Guthrie's rep and the several cogs that made the hospitable house run with seeming effortless ease. Imagine Blanche Dubois cooking a supper for 12 every midnight.
Their Washington adventures, including a White House evening with the Johnsons, were many. I especially recall a little two-character play they were trying out at Olney, in the Maryland suburbs, under the direction of Jose Ferrer. Jan de Hartog's comedy-drama covered the downs and ups of a marriage over a period of 40 years. He called it ``The Fourposter'' and it would run from 1951 for four years in New York and around the country.
Usually but not always, they acted together, she Linda Loman to his Willy in ``Death of a Salesman,'' in one-acts under the title ``Triple Play,'' ``The Man in the Dog Suit'' and Roald Dahl's ``The Honeys.''
At Connecticut's American Shakespeare Theater she went back to the Shakespeare of her youth, to Brecht's ``The Caucasian Chalk Circle,'' Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya and Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd in Durenmatt's ``The Physicists.''
In those days, the early '60s, Roger Stevens was striving to get the Kennedy Center to be at least a hole in the ground. After I'd been cool to the Dahl play, three couples sat sipping wine until 4 in the morning in our Georgetown living room, dreaming of a company for the center - Roger and Christine Stevens, Hume and Jessica, my Christine and me. We chose the plays that would rotate in repertory in that large backstage space of the Eisenhower Theater. We chose the supporting company and the variety of plays with an American accent. It was wonderful and boozy and though we never forgot it, it never was to be. The expense would have been too great.
The Cronyns' exemplary marriage was the second for them both, Jessica having first been married to English actor Jack Hawkins, with whom she had a daughter, Susan. After several years of Hume's courtship, they married in 1942. They had two children of their own, Christopher and Tandy.
One of their early enthusiasms was their private island in the Bahamas, Children's Bay Cay off the Exumas. While they enjoyed having company there, Jess did complain about the housekeeping logistics: ``Can you imagine just the lists you have to make merely for groceries?'' she laughed. The island prompted Hume to think of getting his own plane - and piloting it himself. He asked advice from that experienced flier, James Stewart, describing the sandy spot's short landing strip. Jimmy sighed: ``It'd be a dandy way to drown.''
I can hear Jess laugh as she told that story in the Stewart drawl. For all her lissome grace, her steely looks and her immense self-control, I think what I'll always remember most about this fine actress was her gloriously free, unfettered laughter.
Which is why, I guess, she never seemed to complain about not playing Blanche, as she should have done, on the screen. And she knew that though Dana Ivey had played Miss Daisy in the New York stage production, it was Jess who got to do her on film. And thereby win that long-delayed Oscar.
Richard Coe is critic emeritus of The Washington Post.
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