Frances de la Tour

File:Frances De La Tour Screenshot.jpg

Frances de la Tour as she appeared in the TV show Rising Damp

Frances de la Tour (born July 30 1944) in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire is a disctinctive English actress.

Beginnings

She was educated at London's Lycée Français and the Drama Centre, (a breakaway group from the Central School of Speech and Drama) before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1965 where she studied with Michel Saint-Denis. Over the next six years, she played many small roles with the RSC in a variety of plays, gradually building up to larger parts such as Hoyden in The Relapse and culminating in Peter Brook's acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which she played Helena as a comic tour de force.

The RSC and the National

In the 1970s she worked steadily both on the stage and on television. Some of her notable appearances were Rosalind in As You Like It at the Oxford Playhouse in 1975, Isabella in The White Devil at the Old Vic in 1976. In 1980, she played Stephanie, the violinist with MS in Duet for One, the play written for her by her husband, Tom Kempinski, for which she won the Olivier for Best Actress. She played Sonya in Uncle Vanya opposite Donald Sinden at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1982. Her performance as Josie in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten won her another Olivier for Best Actress in 1983. She joined the National Theatre for the title role in Saint Joan in 1984 and appeared there in Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1986. She again won the Olivier for Best Supporting Actress for Martin Sherman's play about Isadora Duncan, When She Danced with Vanessa Redgrave at the Globe (now the Gielgud) Theatre in 1991, Leo in Les parents terribles at the National in 1994. She co-starred with Maggie Smith in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women at the Wyndham's in 1994 and with Alan Howard in Albee's The Play About the Baby at the Almeida in 1998). In 1999, she returned to the RSC to play Cleopatra opposite Alan Bates in Antony and Cleopatra. In 2004, she played Mrs Lintott in Alan Bennett 's The History Boys at the National, later on Broadway and in the film version (2006).

Miss Jones

On television, her many appearances have included the TV version of Duet for One, the series A Kind of Living, Tom Jones, episodes of Poirot, Marple and Waking the Dead. She is best-known, however, for playing spinster Ruth Jones in the hit Yorkshire Television comedy Rising Damp. De la Tour did not get on well with her Rising Damp co-star Leonard Rossiter, and subsequently she has declined, for the most part, to be interviewed about this period of her life. But she told Richard Webber, when he wrote his book about the series in 2001 ('Rising Damp: A Celebration'), that Miss Jones "was an interesting character to play. We laughed a lot on set, but comedy is a serious business and Leonard took it particularly seriously, and rightly so. Comedy, which is so much down to timing, is exhausting work. But it was a happy time."

Tennessee Williams described her performance in his play Small Craft Warnings in London's West End in 1973 as one of the best he had seen by any actress in any play.

Recent activity

In 2005 she played Olympe Maxime, headmistress of Beauxbatons Academy, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She recently (Dec 2005) starred in the highly acclaimed anti-Iraq-war one-woman play, Peace Mom by Dario Fo, based on the writings of Cindy Sheehan, in London. She won a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award in 2006 for her work in The History Boys on Broadway. New York's critics have described her performance as "the drollest performance you'll ever see", "superb", "sublime", "marvellous" and "perfect". [1].

In the 1970s, she was a member of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party alongside Vanessa Redgrave. She continued to work frequently with Redgrave, and later joined the same political grouping – the Marxist Party.

She is the sister of Andy de la Tour.

Awards

She won the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award four times.

• 1980: Best Actress in a New Play, Duet for One
• 1984: Best Actress in a Revival, A Moon for the Misbegotten
• 1992: Best Actress in a Supporting Role, When She Danced
• 1994: Best Actress, Les parents terribles

Selected filmography

• Rising Damp (1974-1978) - Miss Ruth Jones
• Rising Damp (1980) - Miss Ruth Jones
• Flickers (1980) - Maud Cole
• Cold Lazarus (1996) - Emma Porlock
• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1997) - Aunt Western
• The Cherry Orchard (1999) - Charlotte Ivanovna
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) - Madame Olympe Maxime
• The Moving Finger (2006) - Mrs. Maud Dane Calthrop

External links

• Frances de la Tour at the Internet Movie Database
• Frances de la Tour at the Internet Broadway Database
• But you're beautiful, Miss Jones: Interview