Peggy Ashcroft Days", Lillian Hellman's "Watch on the Rhine" and Pinter's "Family Voices". Her RSC roles were Lidya in Aleksei Arbuzov's "Old World" (1976), and her final stage part was the Countess in "All's Well That Ends Well", which she played at Stratford in 1981 and in London in 1982. In the years after her last stage appearance Ashcroft made occasional, but highly successful, television and film appearances. For "The Jewel in the Crown" she won a BAFTA award for best actress in 1984, and for her portrayal of Mrs Moore in David Lean's 1985 film "A Passage to India" she won
Peggy Ashcroft desire to become a professional actress. Ashcroft was determined, however, and at the age of sixteen, she enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama, run by Elsie Fogerty, from whom her mother had taken lessons some years before. The school's emphasis was on the voice and elegant diction, which did not appeal to Ashcroft or to her fellow pupil Laurence Olivier. She learned more from reading "My Life in Art" by Constantin Stanislavski, the influential director of the Moscow Art Theatre. While still a student, Ashcroft made her professional stage debut at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in a