AustLit

'For a long time there Dame Judith Anderson was the most famous Australian actress in the world. She wasn’t a huge film star like Errol Flynn (with whom she shared a quite discernible Australian accent) but in my childhood she was prominently featured in the supporting cast of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, she was Big Mama to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Elizabeth Taylor/Paul Newman Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and to cap everything off she gave what actor Peter Eyre described as one of the most vivid performances in the history of the world: the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Hitchcock’s 1940 tribute to post-Bronte-style Gothic romance, Rebecca. She was a ­famous Lady Macbeth and an implacable Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and she gave the most ­celebrated 20th-century performance in a Greek tragedy when she stormed the New York stage (and a lot of others around the world) as ­Euripides’ Medea. Not even Laurence Olivier’s ­Oedipus Rex ranks so high.' (Introduction)