Dame Judith Anderson (1984)

Dame Judith Anderson played the matriarch Minx Lockridge on Santa Barbara from 1984 to 1987. Interestingly enough, the actress had been a resident of the real Santa Barbara since 1940 and she was an avid follower of another daytime drama SB's creators, Jerome and Bridget Dobson, had written for many years, General Hospital.

"My character, Minx Lockridge, is eccentric, willful, funny, naughty – all the goodies that make for a great character," Anderson said before SB's premiere. "I'm pulling characteristics out of myself and passing them on." The role earned her a 1985-86 Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Daytime Drama Series.

Career
Dame Judith was born Frances Margaret Anderson on February 10, 1898 in Adelaide, Australia. She was a teenager when she made her stage debut in the 1915 production of Royal Divorce at the Theater Royal in Sydney. Coming to America in 1918, she appeared on the New York stage for the next two years and, in 1920, toured with a U.S. stock company. She gained notoriety through numerous stage roles, including Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra, Gertrude in Hamlet and the title role in Medea (especially written for her by Robinson Jeffers) on Broadway in 1947. Her other stage triumphs include Macbeth, Dear Brutus, Dove, Strange Interlude and Old Maid. She won a Tony Award for her performance in Medea, and in 1982 she also appeared in the Broadway revival.

Anderson began her motion picture career in 1933 in Blood Money, and her many films include such classics as Kings Row, Laura, Diary of a Chambermaid, Red House, And Then There Were None, Tycoon, Pursued, Salome, The Ten Commandments, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Man Called Horse. One of her most memorable screen portrayals was as the malicious Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. One of her last theatrical features was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

She also starred in two television films, The Underground Man and The Borrowers, both for NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame series. She received two Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in Hallmark productions of Macbeth, in 1955 and in 1961. In 1960, for her "distinguished contribution to the stage," the actress was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

Death
Anderson portrayed Minx Lockridge until her retirement in 1987. Illness forced her to remain out of the limelight until her death on January 3, 1992. She died of pneumonia at her home in Santa Barbara. Following her death, Nicolas Coster (Lionel) told Soap Opera Weekly, "Her reputation preceded her. However, our first meeting was not that pleasant, she was rather condescending. So I said to her, 'Dame Judith, I have worked with Sir Laurence Olivier (on Becket) and he was much more polite that you.' We then got along famously. She was wonderfully inappropriate. It was a thrill being in her presence."

Louise Sorel, who played Augusta, told Soap Opera Digest that Anderson was "the closest thing to a role model" that she had had, and much more. "She was a pain in the ass, but I loved her to death, and I was almost mute when she died. I had a very hard time with it. She was fierce and you couldn't lie to her. She was always on me about the theater, saying, 'You must go back to the theater. You belong on the stage.' She'd never seen me on stage until she finally saw us do this rather poor version of Hamlet with Lane Davies. She was very quiet afterwards. She was upset about what they did with me on SB, and most of the time she was railing about it, even when she was long gone from it. But she was a truthteller, and she was tough."