James Earl Jones Drives Vanessa Redgrave to West End???

The producers of Broadway’s Driving Miss Daisy last night (12 June 2011) confirmed on the Tony Awards’ red carpet that they will bring the show and stars Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones to London for a 12-week run this October. Alfred Uhry‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning Off-Broadway show played 1,195 performances at the John Houseman Theatre from 1987 to 1990 and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1989 starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. The Broadway revival opened at the Golden Theatre on 25 October running to 9 April 2011. Driving Miss Daisy sees a widowed Jewish woman deemed too old to drive by her son, who hires an African American man to serve as her chauffeur. What begins as a troubled and hostile pairing blossoms into a life-altering friendship.

Vanessa Redgrave‘s last London stage outing was The Year of Magical Thinking, the National Theatre’s staging of Joan Didion‘s memoir, directed by David Hare. The one-woman play transferred to the NT Lyttelton in 2008 following a 2007 Broadway run. James Earl Jones was last seen in the West End as Big Daddy in an all-African-American production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Whatsonstage.com Award-winning production played the Novello Theatre last year following a New York run at the Broadhurst Theatre.