It had waited 38 year but Broadway has suddenly taken Dame Judi Dench to its heart again.
She has broken the record for box office advance sales with her latest play taking over from the attractions of a naked Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room.
Her production of David Hare's Amy's View has taken an unprecedented. £3.2 million in advance tickets primarily due, observers believe to her Oscar success in Shakespeare in Love.
The previous record for a non-musical, £2.5 million, was for Miss Kidman's gruelling arid explicit stage show which transferred to New York after a sell-out season in London.
Dame Judi, 64, was unable to attend last night's Bafta awards due to previews of the play which opens at the Barrymore Theatre on Thursday.
Her triumphant Broadway return, follows her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her eight nimute performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.
Since then, Americans have warmed to her. She was recently astonished to walk into a Manhattan restaurant and be met with a spontaneous round of applause. In rehearsals she has impressed jaundiced New Yorkers by refusing to act like a prima donna. At a cast party, she chatted with production staff and moved among fans.
In Amy's View she plays actress Esme Allen, who is devoted to her only daughter, Amy, as Dame Judi is to her own daughter Finty.
While she is delighted to be back on Broadway, she believes this year's Oscar, coming on top of last year's Oscar nomination and January's Best Actress Golden Globe for her role as Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown, will lead to more film roles.
She told the Los Angeles Times "Since winning the Golden Globe I've had many more film scripts to consider and that can be troubling because I'm just not very good at choosing."
However the veteran actress who played M in the last two Bond films and who can also be seen in Tea With Mussolini with Dame Joan Plowright, Dame Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin and Cher, says the stage will always be her first love.
'I think of myself as this enormous console with hundreds of buttons, each of which I must press at exactly the right time,' she explained.
'I always want to make a speech at the end of a performance 'If yon don't like it this evening come back tomorrow because it may be ever so much better'!' That's something you can't do with film or television that's why I can't bear to look at myself on film. I want to change it.'
Dame Judi's storming of Broadway is the latest step in the foreign domination of the New York stage. As well as herself and 31-year-.old Miss Kidman, former Brookside star Anna Friel has been stunning audiences there.
Her latest play, Closer, with fellow Britons Natasha Richardson and Rupert Graves, opened a fortnight ago and one critic described her as having burst over the Broadway sky like a bombshell'.
Miss Friel 22, said: 'In England it you're on stage and you get hailed for being a good theatre actor or actress you get a pat on the back and that's it.
'But here it's a major thing. Everyone is so receptive and the whole city gets behind you and the production. you're in. The cab drivers read the the-atre pages so even they know what's going on.
Now the girl who has moved from British soap to Broadway is tipped to become Hollywood's newest hot property.
She stars alongside Ewan McGregor in the film Rogue Trader about the life of jailed Barings Bank fraudster Nick Leeson which Is expected to be screened later this year.
Thanks to Meggie for sending me this picture and the article.