Geraldine McEwan

Like Judi Dench, Geraldine McEwan is a British actress best known for her stage roles who has also made the occasional foray into film and television. Born and raised in Windsor, she began her acting career as a teenager and gradually made her way through various repertory companies to land in the mid-1950s at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. After joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, McEwan distinguished herself in such roles as Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Ophelia in "Hamlet." Over the course of the next three decades, the actress amassed a formidable array of credits, originating roles in such contemporary classics as Joe Orton's "Loot" (1965) and tackling many of the classics like "The School for Scandal" (her Broadway debut in 1963), "The Rivals" (in 1983) and more recently, the absurdist "The Chairs" (a return to Broadway in 1998).