📍Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK
1939 – 1956“I was born in Ilford, Essex, in 1934, but when I was four my family moved to Oxford, where my father worked as a pathologist at the university. I was the youngest, with older twin brothers, and my mother came from Glasgow and had firm views about respectability. Oxford in the war and the years afterwards was a city of colleges, bicycles, rationing and undergraduates, and I watched that world with great interest from just outside it. I went to Oxford High School for Girls, but I was not a scholar. I wanted to act, and at sixteen I left school to study at the Oxford Playhouse School. The Playhouse gave me my training and my first chances, and in 1952 I played Viola in Twelfth Night for the Oxford University Dramatic Society, my first real role. I found that I could make an audience laugh, often by being dry and a little sharp, and that I could hold a stage. Oxford's student theatre and revues were full of talented young people, and I learned a great deal from them. I moved to London, joined revues, and soon Laurence Olivier invited me into the National Theatre. Then came The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, my two Oscars, Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess and Professor McGonagall at Hogwarts. Much of that precise, wry style was formed in Oxford, where a clever, watchful girl learned to hold her own. Oxford High School counts me among its pioneers, and the Playhouse, where my career began, still trains young actors.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today