Peggy Ashcroft: Peggy Ashcroft. Actress: A Passage to India. Academy Award-winning, legendary English actress - who maintained her status in the British acting elite for decades. Made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956. Almost always on stage, she appeared rarely in film, her first being The Wandering Jew (1933). On stage she was cast in many a Shakespearean role, but in film she usually played sympathetic...