Zoe Caldwell, a four-time Tony Award winner, has died. She was 86.
Her son Charlie Whitehead said Caldwell died peacefully Sunday at her home in Pound Ridge, New York. Whitehead said her death was due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.
Three of her four Tonys came in collaborations with her husband, Robert Whitehead, who was one of Broadway’s most prolific producers of serious drama.
Caldwell was born in 1933 in Melbourne, Australia, to a family struggling to make it through the Depression. In her memoir, “I Will Be Cleopatra,” she wrote that she knew at an early age that her job would be “keeping audiences awake and in their seats.”
“I knew this because it was the only thing I could do,” she wrote. Despite the family’s tight budget, the Caldwells were regular theater-goers, she wrote, and “I saw every singer, dancer, actor, or vaudevillian who came to Melbourne.”
She made her stage debut at age 9 in a Melbourne production of “Peter Pan.”
Her husband died in 2002 at age 86, shortly after he had received a special Tony Award for his nearly 60-year career.
She and Whitehead had two sons, Sam and Charlie. In addition to her two sons, she is survived by two grandchildren.
“I always knew I would be an actor. I am an actor,” she told the AP in 1986. “But being a wife and a mother still seems to me to be some kind of extraordinary stuff.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report