As of 2017, Jessica Tandy is the oldest actress to receive the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), for which she also won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. Basically, before she obtained her Award for Best Actress, she had mainly played supporting roles in movies.

Tandy who was born in London in 1909 and died in 1994 (aged 85) trained at acting and made her stage debut at the age of 18 in The Manderson Girls. She spent time at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company, which was founded 1913 and made her first London appearance in 1929, in The Rumour. In New York, she started her acting in The Matriarch in 1930.

During her life, her movie roles included Joseph Cotten's unfeeling wife in September Affair (1950) and the wife of Rommel (James Mason) in The Desert Fox (1951). In Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds (1963), she acted as a monstrous mother.

Then, in the 1980s, her movie appearances began to become more frequent. At first, she played Hume Cronyn's wife in John Schlesinger's Honky Tonk Freeway (1981) and one of Robin Williams's grandparents in The World According to Garp (1982). She also acted in the box-office success, Cocoon (1985) and its sequel, Cocoon: the return (1988). And, she was in the 1987 film, Foxfire. But, it was the film, Driving Miss Daisy (1989) that brought her many new admirers. Critics and others stated that her integrity, intelligence, and humor in her work were pleasures not always found in senior actresses.

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