United States Prior to establishing herself on the West End and one year before moving to London, Worth made her Broadway debut in "The Two Mrs. Carrolls" in 1943. Despite her expansive work in the UK, she continued to perform on Broadway, and in 1960 earned her first
Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play for
Toys in the Attic. Worth won her first Tony in 1965 for her work as Miss Alice in
Tiny Alice (Best Actress in a Play). Along with her other Tony wins for Princess Kosmonopolis in a revival of
Tennessee Williams's
Sweet Bird of Youth (1976, Best Actress in a Play) and Grandma Kurnitz in
Lost in Yonkers (1991,
Best Featured Actress in a Play), Worth earned another nomination in 1977 for
The Cherry Orchard (Best Actress in a Play). In 1957, Worth displayed her versatility as an actress in the title role of
Schiller's tragedy
Mary Stuart on Broadway, co-starring
Eva Le Gallienne. She also appeared in the premiere of
The Lady from Dubuque, another Albee play, which closed after 12 performances; a revival of
Ibsen's
John Gabriel Borkman; and
The Golden Age by
A.R. Gurney. Toward the end of the decade she played Winnie in
Beckett's Happy Days.
Shakespeare and the West End Worth joined the
Old Vic company in 1951, where she worked with
Tyrone Guthrie and played the roles of Desdemona in
Othello, Helena in ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Portia in The Merchant of Venice'' and her first
Lady Macbeth. The company went to South Africa with Worth as one of the leading ladies. In 1953, she joined the fledgling
Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario for its inaugural season. There she was the principal leading lady, performing under an enormous tent with
Alec Guinness in ''
All's Well That Ends Well and Richard III. Also in Stratford, she was an acclaimed Hedda Gabler, a role she considered one of her more satisfying achievements and which prompted Walter Kerr to write a glowing review of her theatrical talent in The New York Times.'' Worth returned to London in
N.C. Hunter's "Chekhovian" drama
A Day by the Sea, with a cast that included
John Gielgud and
Ralph Richardson. She joined the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry for
Ugo Betti's
The Queen and the Rebels. Her transformation from "a rejected slut cowering at her lover's feet into a redemption of regal poise" ensured a transfer to London, where
Kenneth Tynan wrote of her technique: "It is grandiose, heartfelt, marvellously controlled, clear as crystal and totally unmoving." In the 1950s Worth played in the farce
Hotel Paradiso in London with
Alec Guinness. In
Ivor Brown's play ''William's Other Anne'', which she played Shakespeare's first girlfriend
Anne Whateley opposite
John Gregson as Shakespeare. She also made a number of well-regarded appearances in British films of the period, most notably her powerful performance as a French Resistance agent in
Anthony Asquith's 1958 wartime espionage drama
Orders to Kill, which earned her the BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actress.
The RSC, the National Theatre and Greenwich In 1962, she joined the
Royal Shakespeare Company at the
Aldwych Theatre, and it was there that she gave some of her great performances. She was Goneril to
Paul Scofield's Lear in
Peter Brook's acclaimed
King Lear, the first of many collaborations with Brook. She repeated her Lady Macbeth and appeared again for Brook in
Friedrich Dürrenmatt's
The Physicists. Playing an asylum superintendent, she showed the darker side of her acting. Following work on Broadway, she returned to the
RSC at the Aldwych to repeat her role. She worked with Peter Brook in Paris and toured Iran with
Orghast, Brook's attempt to develop an international theatre language. She joined the
National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1968 to play Jocasta in Peter Brook's production of
Seneca's
Oedipus, opposite Gielgud. She appeared with Sir
Noël Coward's in his trilogy,
Suite in Three Keys, in which he made his last on-stage appearance. In 1974, she appeared in three thematically linked plays at the
Greenwich Theatre directed by
Jonathan Miller under the umbrella title of Family Romances and using the same actors for each play. Worth took the roles of Gertrude in
Hamlet, Madame Arkadina in Chekhov's
The Seagull, and Mrs Alving in Ibsen's
Ghosts.
The later years She starred as the goddess Athena in The
National Radio Theater's 1981
Peabody Award-winning radio drama of
The Odyssey of Homer. On screen in 1982, Worth co-starred with
Michael Caine and
Christopher Reeve in the film version of a Broadway murder mystery
Deathtrap, playing a psychic. In 1984, Sir
Peter Hall invited her to return to the National Theatre to play Volumnia in
Coriolanus, with Sir
Ian McKellen in the title role. The impresario
Joseph Papp persuaded her to repeat Volumnia off-Broadway in a production by
Steven Berkoff, when she again was partnered by Christopher Walken as Coriolanus. She was seen in Sir
David Hare's
The Bay at Nice (National, 1987), for which she was nominated for the
Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year. She then appeared in
Chère Maître (New York, 1998 and Almeida, London 1999), compiled by
Peter Eyre from the letters of
George Sand and
Gustave Flaubert. Worth also starred along with Sir
Michael Hordern in
George Bernard Shaw's play
You Never Can Tell at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in 1987 and 1988. In 1991, she won a third Tony for her performance as the tough-as-nails Grandma Kurnitz in
Neil Simon's
Lost in Yonkers, and later appeared in the film version along with
Richard Dreyfuss and
Mercedes Ruehl. In 1999, she appeared in the film
Onegin. As she was about to begin preview performances in a Broadway revival of
Anouilh's
Ring Round the Moon, Worth had a stroke and never appeared in the production. She continued to act, and in September 2001, one of her later appearances was with Paul Scofield at the
Almeida Theatre in the two-handed play
I Take Your Hand in Mine, by Carol Rocamora based on the love letters of
Anton Chekhov and
Olga Knipper.
Recitals During the mid-1960s in New York, Worth and Gielgud had collaborated in a series of dramatic readings, first from T.S. Eliot and
Edith Sitwell and then from Shakespeare. It was a form of theatre at which she became more adept as she grew older, drawing from
Virginia Woolf,
Ivan Turgenev and Noël Coward. She referred to them as "her recitals". In the mid-1990s, she devised and performed a two-hour monologue
Portrait of Edith Wharton, based on
Wharton's life and writings. Using no props, costumes or sets, she created characters entirely through vocal means. ==Death and funeral==