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Actress Constance Cummings, Famed on Two Continents, Dies at 95

Constance Cummings

Constance Cummings, an American film and theater actress who had her greatest success as a stage star in England, has died at age 95.

Born on May 15, 1910, the daughter of a Seattle lawyer and a concert soprano, Cummings began her career in the chorus of Broadway shows. Her early Hollywood films included The Criminal Code, The Last Parade, Lover Come Back, Traveling Husbands, The Guilty Generation, Behind the Mas, American Madness, and Heads We Go. Cummings met the English playwright Benn Wolfe Levy in Hollywood, and the two were married in 1933. She earned praise for her work in her husband's play Young Madame Conti (1936) in the West End and went on to display her versaility in a wide variety of roles.

Famous for her beauty as well as her talent, Cummings often performed under the direction of her husband. Among her many other West End credits were her husband's plays Clutterbuck (1946), Return to Tyassi (1950), The Rape of the Belt (1957) and Public and Confidential (1966), as well as Clifford Odets' Winter Journey (1952), in which she played the wife of Michael Redgrave's alcholic actor, and Joseph Kramm's The Shrike, in which she starred opposite Sam Wanamaker. At the Oxford Playhouse, she appeared in a notable 1957 production of Lysistrata and in such other plays as Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) , Max Beerbohm's A Social Success, and Aldous Huxley's The Genius and the Goddess.

In later years, she played Gertrude opposite Nicol Williamson in Hamlet and Volumnia opposite Anthony Hopkins in Coriolanus; Mary Tyrone in Michael Blakemore's production of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, with Laurence Olivier as James Tyrone; and Madame Ranevskya in a 1973 National Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard. She had a major success as a mentally ill woman attempting to recover from a stroke in Arthur Kopit's Wings at the Cottesloe in 1978, later repeating that performance on Broadway and winning a Tony Award.

Cummings' appearances on the English stage outside of London included roles in Tennessee Williams's The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More in Glasgow, G.B. Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession in Bristol, Edward Albee's All Over in Brighton, W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle in Guildford, and Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Visit in Coventry. Her last West End performance was in Uncle Vanya in 1999.

In addition to the films noted above, Cummings starred in Blithe Spirit (1945), The Intimate Stranger (1956), The Battle of the Sexes (1959), In the Cool of the Day (1963), and many others, as well as in television adaptations of Long Day's Journey Into Night and Wings. Her most recent TV appearances were in Love Song (1985) and Agatha Christie's Dead Man's Folly (1986).

Her husband died in 1973. Cummings is survived by her children, Jonathan and Jemina.

 

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