This questing spirit survived into extreme age. She had always opposed censorship and responded positively to much of post-1956 theatre from Look Back in Anger and The Caretaker to Jesus Christ Superstar. It was her misfortune — and ours — that that theatre had little to offer her generation. She admired Brecht’s humanity and in her prime would have made a magnificent Mother Courage or illuminated Beckett’s Happy Days.

Jonathan Croall’s meticulous biography illustrates how the critical jury was often split on Thorndike. Her exuberance — ‘I like to go slap-bang like the Greeks!’ — could take her over the top (‘She’s magnificent if she can keep her arms below her shoulders’ said one producer), but Croall reminds us of such finely-etched performances as her Lady Monchesney, a mother carved from marble opposite Paul Scofield in Eliot’s The Family Reunion or an unforgettable nurse, rooted in the earth like a Courbet-figure, in Uncle Vanya.

She was devoted to causes religious, political and pacifist from Women’s Suffrage to CND it was fitting that she and Casson were together in that legendary Vanya with Olivier and Redgrave for the opening Chichester season. It continued in the repertoire of the first season at the Old Vic (to which she had devoted herself during two world wars) of the National Theatre, for which both Cassons campaigned for decades.

Croall maintains a fine balance between public and private. The critic, James Agate, felt that her greatness was informed by her ‘moral grandeur’, amply illustrated here. But Croall is also alert to what Ralph Richardson pinpointed as ‘the stiletto’ in her character.

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