1. Irene Worth, CBE, born Harriett Elizabeth Abrams, was an American stage and screen actress who became one of the leading stars of the British and American theatre.
28 Facts About Irene Worth
1. 2.
Irene Worth pronounced her first name with three syllables: "I-REE-nee".
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Irene Worth won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress for the 1958 film Orders to Kill.
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Irene Worth was educated at Newport Harbor High School, Santa Ana Junior College, and UCLA.
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Irene Worth changed her name to Irene Worth and by 1944 had settled in London, where she remained for much of her career.
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Irene Worth joined the Old Vic company in 1951, worked with Tyrone Guthrie and there played Desdemona, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portia in The Merchant of Venice and her first Lady Macbeth.
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Irene Worth went to South Africa with Worth as one of the leading ladies.
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Irene Worth joined the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry for Ugo Betti's The Queen and the Rebels.
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Irene Worth made a number of well-regarded appearances in British films of the period, most notably her powerful performance as a French Resistance agent in Anthony Asquith's 1958 wartime espionage drama Orders to Kill, which earned her the BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actress.
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Irene Worth was Goneril to Paul Scofield's Lear in Peter Brook's acclaimed King Lear, the first of many collaborations with Brook.
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Irene Worth recreated her implacable Goneril in the stark, black-and-white film version of this production.
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Irene Worth repeated her Lady Macbeth and appeared again for Brook in Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Physicists.
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Irene Worth then went to New York City in 1965 for the opening of Edward Albee's enigmatic Tiny Alice, in which she co-starred with Sir John Gielgud and which won her the first of her three Tony Awards.
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Irene Worth returned to the RSC at the Aldwych to repeat her role.
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Irene Worth worked with Peter Brook in Paris and toured Iran with Orghast, Brook's attempt to develop an international theatre language.
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Irene Worth joined the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1968 to play Jocasta in Peter Brook's production of Seneca's Oedipus, opposite Gielgud.
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Irene Worth appeared with Sir Noel Coward's in his trilogy, Suite in Three Keys, in which he made his last on-stage appearance.
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Irene Worth took the roles of Gertrude in Hamlet, Madame Arkadina in Chekhov's The Seagull, and Mrs Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts.
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Irene Worth played Princess Kosmonopolis in Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth opposite Christopher Walken, which brought her a second Tony Award.
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Irene Worth was Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, for which she received another Tony nomination and which featured Raul Julia, Mary Beth Hurt and Meryl Streep, whose career was in its beginning stages.
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Irene Worth starred as the goddess Athena in The National Radio Theater's 1981 Peabody Award-winning radio drama of The Odyssey of Homer.
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On screen in 1982, Irene Worth co-starred with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve in the film version of a Broadway murder mystery Deathtrap, playing a psychic.
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Irene Worth was seen in Sir David Hare's The Bay at Nice, for which she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year.
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Irene Worth then appeared in Chere Maitre, compiled by Peter Eyre from the letters of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.
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Irene Worth starred along with Sir Michael Hordern in George Bernard Shaw's play You Never Can Tell at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in 1987 and 1988.
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Irene Worth continued to act, and in September 2001, one of her later appearances was with Paul Scofield at the Almeida Theatre in the two-handed play I Take Your Hand in Mine, by Carol Rocamora based on the love letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper.
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Irene Worth died following a stroke in 2002, in New York's Roosevelt Hospital, at the age of 85.
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Irene Worth was awarded an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975.