Peggy AshcroftFilmography

She's Been Away

Actors: Peggy Ashcroft, Geraldine James, James Fox, Jack Kyle, Rebecca Pidgeon

Synopsis: In her final film, celebrated British actress Peggy Ashcroft portrays one Lillian Huckle. Released from a mental institution after 60 years, Lillian is taken in her nephew (James Fox) and his somewhat trepidatious family. As they (and we) get to know Lillian better, the many social and emotional Read More

Madame Sousatzka

Actors: Shirley MacLaine, Navin Chowdhry, Peggy Ashcroft, Twiggy, Shabana Azmi

Synopsis: Shirley MacLaine is Madame Sousatzka, an aging piano instructor of Russian extraction. Entrenched in a dilapidated London rooming house, the Madame gives lessons only to the most gifted. She does not stop at mere instruction; Sousatzka insists that her pupils conduct their lives in the same Read More

A Perfect Spy

Actors: Peter Egan, Ray McAnally, Alan Howard, Rüdiger Weigang, Jane Booker

Synopsis: This spy outing hones in on secret agent Magnus Pym (Peter Egan). Having impersonated so many different people during his career as a British spy, Pym eventually lost track of who he really was -- a confusion compounded by the fact that he knew nothing of his actual past. Ultimately feeling that Read More

When the Wind Blows

Actors: Peggy Ashcroft, John Mills

Synopsis: In this animated film, based on the novel by Raymond Briggs, an older English couple must struggle to deal with their altered reality when a nuclear war strikes, destroying their peaceful lives. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide Read More

Murder by the Book

Synopsis: In this interesting mystery, famed novelist Agatha Christie has just decided to kill off her popular character, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in her latest novel Curtain. Just as she is about to do so, the detective comes to call. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

A Passage to India

Actors: Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee, Peggy Ashcroft, James Fox, Alec Guinness

Synopsis: A Passage to India, director David Lean's final film (for which he also received editing credit), breaks no new ground cinematically, but remains an exquisitely assembled harkback to such earlier Lean epics as Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter. Based on the novel by E. M. Forster, the film is set Read More

The Jewel in the Crown

Synopsis: Based on Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, Jewel in the Crown was an Emmy-winning 14-part presentation of PBS' Masterpiece Theatre. The story is set during the last two decades of British rule in India. The plot is set in motion by the disappearance of British woman Daphne Manners (Susan Read More

Little Eyolf

Actors: Diana Rigg, Anthony Hopkins

Cream in My Coffee

Actors: Peter Chelsom, Shelagh McLeod, Lionel Jeffries, Peggy Ashcroft

Caught on a Train

Synopsis: Over the course of one night and many miles, the lives of three passengers aboard a trans-European train are changed forever. English businessman Peter (Michael Kitchen) finds to his amazement that the friendship he's struck up with a carefree American woman called Lorraine (Wendy Raebeck) is Read More

Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures

Actors: Peggy Ashcroft, Victor Banerjee, Larry Pine, Aparna Sen, Saeed Jaffrey

Synopsis: Produced for British TV by the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala triumvirate, this India-based comedy was released theatrically in the US. Victor Banerjee, best known to American audiences for his star turn in David Lean's A Passage to India, plays a young rajah named George, while Aparna Sen portrays his Read More

Joseph Andrews

Actors: Ann-Margret, Peter Firth, Michael Hordern, Beryl Reid, Jim Dale

Synopsis: Tony Richardson attempts to re-create the glory days of Tom Jones in this adaptation of the 1742 Henry Fielding novel. Peter Firth stars in this picaresque tale as Joseph Andrews, a young servant switched at birth who undergoes a series of romantic escapades. Joseph even has the fortune of Read More

Der Fussgänger

Actors: Ruth Hausmeister, Gustav Rudolf Sellner

Synopsis: The Pedestrian (Der Fussganger) was the second filmed directorial effort of German actor Maximillian Schell. Billed third under Gustav Rudolf Sellner and Ruth Hausmeister, Schell plays Andreas Giese, a Krupp-like industrialist whose past suddenly returns to haunt him. A newspaper article reveals Read More

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Actors: Cindy Burrows, Emma Schlesinger, Kimi Tallmadge, Patrick Thornberry, Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch, Murray Head, Peggy Ashcroft, Maurice Denham

Synopsis: This British film examines the choices individuals must make when confronted with a romantic relationship which is rewarding but does not offer them everything they want. In this sympathetic and psychologically precise drama, Alexandra Greville (Glenda Jackson), "Alex" to her friends, has a Read More

Three Into Two Won't Go

Actors: Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Judy Geeson, Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Rogers

Synopsis: American actor Rod Steiger adopts a British accent to keep apace with his co-stars in Three into Two Won't Go. Steiger plays a prosperous salesman, married to Claire Bloom (Steiger's real-life wife at the time). While on a business trip, the salesman falls for a sexy 19-year-old hitchhiker (Judy Geeson Read More

Tell Me Lies

Actors: Mark Jones, Pauline Munroe, Robert Lloyd, Eric Allan, Paul Scofield, Mary Allen

Synopsis: Subtitled A Film About London, this drama is a quintessential experimental counter-culture film of the late 1960s that centers on the questions raised by the Vietnam war. Renowned Shakespearean theater director Peter Brook serves as producer and director. It includes many members of the Read More

Secret Ceremony

Actors: Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum, Peggy Ashcroft, Pamela Brown

Synopsis: Secret Ceremony was based on a prize-winning short story by Argentine civil servant Marco Denevi. Elizabeth Taylor plays Leonora, an aging prostitute who becomes convinced that Cenci (Mia Farrow) is her daughter -- who supposedly died in infancy. Cenci knows that she is in fact Leonora's niece Read More

The Cherry Orchard

The Nun's Story

Actors: Audrey Hepburn, Peter Finch, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Dean Jagger

Synopsis: Audrey Hepburn stars in The Nun's Story as Sister Luke, postulant of a Belgian order of nuns. Though frequently disillusioned in her efforts to spread good will -- at one point she is nearly killed by a mental patient (Colleen Dewhurst) -- Sister Luke perseveres. Sent as a nurse to the Belgian Read More

Quiet Wedding

Actors: Margaret Lockwood, Derek Farr, Marjorie Fielding, A.E. Matthews, Athene Seyler

Synopsis: The old reliable plot device known as premarital hanky-panky was the basis of the Esther McCracken stage play Quiet Wedding. The film version, scripted by Terence Rattigan and Anton de Grunewald, tones down some of the more censorable elements of the play, though not enough to completely Read More

Rhodes

Actors: Walter Huston, Oscar Homolka, Basil Sydney, Frank Cellier, Peggy Ashcroft

Synopsis: African-American students who have accepted Rhodes scholarships may feel like wincing at Rhodes of Africa, an unabashed celebration of British imperialism. Walter Huston portrays Cecil Rhodes, the 19th century explorer who dreamed of "taming" the rugged African terrain. Establishing the colony of Read More

The Wandering Jew

Actors: Conrad Veidt, Matheson Lang, Marie Ney, Cicely Oates, Malvina Longfellow, Isobel Elsom, Basil Gill, Anne Grey

Synopsis: This story is based both on a long-standing legend and a play by E. Temple Thurston. Veteran British director Maurice Elvey brought years of experience with theatrical adaptations to the difficult task of filming a movie that spans centuries and strains credulity. Conrad Veidt stars as the Jew who Read More

The 39 Steps

Actors: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, Lucie Mannheim

Synopsis: This classic British thriller was one of Alfred Hitchcock's first major international successes, and it introduced a number of the stylistic and thematic elements that became hallmarks of his later work. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a Canadian rancher on vacation in England, attends a music hall Read More

The Wandering Jew

Actors: Conrad Veidt, Ben Adler, Abraham Teitelbaum, Marie Ney, Anne Grey, Joan Maude, Peggy Ashcroft

Synopsis: Filmed in the Yiddish language, The Wandering Jew features Jacob Ben-Ami as a young Jewish artist living in Germany in the early 1930s. As the Nazis gain in influence, the artist's life and livelihood are slowly eroded: his non-Jewish fiancee leaves him and his paintings are rejected by the Read More