“The sharpest detail in my mind is the little skip she performed midway through the second act of ‘Foxfire,’ which she and Mr. Cronyn brought to Broadway in 1982. She was cast as Annie Nations, a 79-year-old Appalachian widow and a paragon of self-sufficiency in her own view, if not that of her son, who wanted her to leave her mountain farm and come live with him in Florida. In a series of flashbacks, she revisited the significant moments of her long and homely life. None proved more entrancing than the occasion, some six decades earlier, when she first met her husband. (That was Mr. Cronyn.)

Miss Tandy actually shed those six decades before your very eyes. Crossing the stage, she jumped blithely off the ground, tossed her arms up in the air and tilted her head back, as if to catch a bit of afternoon sunshine. And she was a schoolgirl again. I swear it. The stiffness in her joints, the wrinkles on her face and the crackle in her delivery just evaporated. If time had been a cloak, she couldn’t have slipped it off more effortlessly. The transformation was nothing short of amazing.

Now the generalities. Anyone who saw her over the years knew the silvery enchantment she was capable of. She was one of the sublime actresses of the 20th century, precise and economical in all she did, graceful even in depicting gracelessness, always careful to hold back a little something, so there was mystery in her art. She was a beautiful woman who somehow became more translucently beautiful as she aged. Her eyes could dance. There were ripples of laughter in her voice. And she had class.” —David Richards

Photo: Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn in New York, Ron Galella, 1989.