LEST WE FORGET  IRENE WORTH
                         (June 23, 1916 - March 9, 2002)

"Miss Worth is just possibly the best actress in the world."
            Walter Kerr, The New York Times Theater critic

She received a Bachelor of Education degree from UCLA and taught kindergarten for two years.  Despite her lack of formal training for the stage, she set out on a theatre career in 1942 with the road company of Escape Me Never, directed by the Russian director, Theodore Komisarjevsky.  The following year she made her Broadway debut in The Two Mrs. Carrolls with Elizabeth Bergner.   Bergner advised her to go to England to broaden her experience of English classical theatre and to study with the voice teacher Elsie Fogerty in London.   "In those days we had no Off-Broadway, no Phoenix Theatre, no stock companies, not even a Stratford Connecticut Shakespeare Festival. Nothing but Broadway."
        She very quickly found employment in the English theatre, and for the next thirty years, she played a diverse range of roles on stage, radio, television and film, with actors and actresses of the stature of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness, and Peggy Ashcroft, and earning a reputation as one of the great actresses of her generation.
   

She was awarded Tonys for her portrayal of the lead in Edward Albee's Tiny Alice.  Best Actress in Sweet Bird of Youth by Tennessee Williams,  and for Best Featured  Actress in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers, for which she also won the Drama Desk Award.  She appeared several times at the acclaimed Stratford Shakespeare Festival and in 1962 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Goneril in Peter Brook's critically acclaimed King Lear, with Paul Scofield.

Irene Worth has received many honors, but especially notable is the honorary award of Commander of the British Empire, presented by Queen Elizabeth in 1975 for her distinguished contribution to dramatic art.  She received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Queens College, New York.

She was passionately interested in the craft of acting, and in her interviews she gave selflessly of her knowledge and experience for the benefit of young performers. She deprecated the assumption that actors cannot (and should not) read, write, or think too much.  "They should study painting and sculpture and music. They should know what Titian was doing; what a Bellini sky is like; they should know the cast of a Giotto figure.  They should know history. . .They should know what is going on in terms of human values and human experience."
(Village Voice, August 27, 1979).  Above all, Irene Worth was a fine human being, whose talents touched whole generations of dedicated playgoers. Of her chosen profession she has said, "Everything I have done has always been a choice, and I don't regret what I've chosen.  I've very rich inwardly, I've had such a fulfilled career, even if I were never to act again." (Women's Wear Daily, March 7, 1984).

Reference:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989    Sam McCready