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 Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and the title role in "The Duchess of Malfi". She won excellent notices, but the productions were thought to lack flair and were unfavourably compared with the exciting work of the rival Old Vic company under Richardson and Olivier's leadership. After the Haymarket season Ashcroft resumed her break from the theatre, first campaigning for her husband, who stood as a Labour candidate in the 1945 general election, and then bearing a second child, Nicholas, in 1946. Returning to the stage in 1947, Ashcroft had two long-running successes in a row as the alcoholic Evelyn