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 success, winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and several British and European awards. Ashcroft was born in Croydon, Surrey, the younger child and only daughter of William Worsley Ashcroft (1878–1918), a land agent, and his wife, Violetta Maud, "née" Bernheim (1874–1926). The biographer Michael Billington writes that Violetta Ashcroft was of Danish and German-Jewish descent and a keen amateur actress. Ashcroft's father was killed on active service in the First World War. She attended Woodford School, East Croydon, where one of her teachers encouraged her love of Shakespeare, but neither her teachers nor her mother approved of her