Dame Judith Anderson AC DBE (1897–1992) was an Adelaide-born stage and film actress well known for her role as the sinister Mrs Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). She made her stage debut in Sydney in A Royal Divorce (1915) and two years later migrated to America. Roles on Broadway in plays such as Cobra (1924), Strange Interlude (1928–1929), Mourning Becomes Electra (1932) and Hamlet (1936) contributed to her growing reputation, but it was her performance in Medea (1948) that saw her acclaimed as America's leading stage performer and won her a Tony Award. She earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Rebecca and went on to appear in many films including Laura (1944), And Then There Were None (1945) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). She won an Emmy Award for her role as Lady Macbeth in the television production of Macbeth (1960). A style icon, Anderson regularly appeared in the pages of Vogue. In her late eighties Anderson was nominated for an Emmy Award for her performance as Minx Lockridge in the soap opera, Santa Barbara (1984–1987).
Artist Don Bachardy recorded many of the celebrities and artists working in Los Angeles, encouraging his sitters to autograph his portraits, as in this work.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 1999
© Don Bachardy
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Christopher Chapman absorbs the gentle touch of Don Bachardy’s portraiture.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
