Rosemary Harris

The role that should've launched a film career went to someone else. She originated Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter on Broadway in 1966, won the Tony opposite Robert Preston, and then watched Hollywood hand the part to Katharine Hepburn because the producers didn't think she was famous enough. Hepburn won the Oscar.

Before that snub, she'd already played Ophelia opposite Peter O'Toole in the National Theatre's inaugural Hamlet and Desdemona opposite Richard Burton at the Old Vic. Hollywood kept looking the other way.

At 74, she became Aunt May in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man and got more famous from three comic book movies than from a half-century of classical theater. She was almost 80 when the third one came out. That's not a late-career cameo. That's a whole new audience discovering someone the stage world already knew.

The Tonys handed her a Lifetime Achievement award in 2019, which she accepted at 91 after nine nominations and 27 Broadway shows. She was still performing in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center at 90. The woman Hollywood told wasn't famous enough in 1968 outlasted almost everyone who was.

Growing up on the Northwest Frontier of British India, on the border with Afghanistan, because her father was an RAF officer, is the kind of childhood detail that sounds invented. She bounced between convent schools, settled on nursing as a career, and stumbled into acting with a stage debut in Bognor Regis in 1948. No formal training. Not exactly the opening chapter of a theatrical dynasty.

Her daughter Jennifer Ehle followed her into the industry anyway. They kept showing up in the same projects, playing young and old versions of the same character in both The Camomile Lawn and Sunshine. In 2000, they were both nominated for Best Actress in a Play at the Tonys. Jennifer won.