Joyce Redman

Joyce Redman was an Anglo-Irish actress who grew up in County Mayo, Ireland, and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1936. Her early stage work drew praise for Shadow and Substance, Claudia and Lady Precious Stream, and she won notice in New York in 1949 as Anne Boleyn opposite Rex Harrison in Maxwell Anderson's Anne of the Thousand Days. In 1955 she joined Stratford-upon-Avon's Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, where she played Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Helena in All's Well That Ends Well. Mainly a stage performer, she earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress, as Mrs. Waters in Tom Jones (1963) and Emilia in Othello (1965), the latter opposite Maggie Smith and Laurence Olivier and earning a Golden Globe nomination too. She starred in the 1968 birth control comedy Prudence and the Pill, appeared in the 1974 BBC serial Notorious Woman, and played Queen Victoria in Victoria & Albert (2001).