Boyd Gaines to Join Australian Production of Driving Miss Daisy, Starring James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury

Four-time Tony winner Boyd Gaines, currently headlining the Broadway revival of An Enemy of the People, will join James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury in the previously reported Australian debut of Driving Miss Daisy.

Gaines will star as Boolie Werthan, a role he also played in the play's 2010 Broadway revival. Jones and Lansbury recently shared the stage in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man. 

Gaines is the winner of four Tony Awards for Gypsy, She Loves Me, The Heidi Chronicles and Contact, and he received a fifth Tony nomination for Journey’s End. His other stage credits include Pygmalion, Twelve Angry Men, Cabaret, The Show Off, Company and The Columnist.

Directed by David Esbjornson, the play concerns Daisy Werthan (Lansbury), a widowed, 72-year-old Jewish woman living in midcentury Atlanta, who is deemed too old to drive, and her son (Gaines) hires Hoke Colburn (Jones), an African-American man, to serve as her chauffeur. What begins as a troubled and hostile pairing, soon blossoms into a profound, life-altering friendship that transcends all the societal boundaries placed between them.