Tony Winner Margaret Tyzack Passes Away at 79

According to published reports, stage and screen star Margaret Tyzack died in her home earlier this week, on June 25. She was 79 years old.

Tyzack is noted for her classical stage roles, having joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. She received an Olivier Award in 1982 for a revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Tony award in 1991 for the play Lettice and Lovage, in which she appeared in both the London and Broadway productions opposite Dame Maggie Smith. In 2008 she received acclamation for her portrayal of Mrs St Maugham in a revival of Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse, London, for which she won the Best Actress award in the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in 2009. In 2009 she appeared alongside Dame Helen Mirren in Phedre at the Royal National Theatre.

She is also remembered for her memorable roles in distinguished BBC teleVision Productions. She played Winifred, Soames's sister, in the acclaimed BBC adaptation ofThe Forsyte Saga in 1967; Queen Anne in The First Churchills; Bette in Cousin Bette; and Antonia the mother of the Emperor Claudius in I, Claudius. In the 1990s she played a major role in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series as the young Indiana Jones' strict Oxford-educated tutor, Miss Helen Seymour.