Dame Edith Mary Evans (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was an English actress. She was best known for her work on the West End stage, but also appeared in films at the beginning and towards the end of her career. Between 1964 and 1968, she was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Evans's stage career spanned sixty years, during which she played more than 100 roles, in classics by Shakespeare, Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Wilde, and plays by contemporary writers including Bernard Shaw, Enid Bagnold, Christopher Fry and Noël Coward. She created roles in two of Shaw's plays: Orinthia in The Apple Cart (1929), and Epifania in The Millionairess (1940) and was in the British premières of two others: Heartbreak House (1921) and Back to Methuselah (1923).

Evans became widely known for portraying haughty aristocratic women, as in two of her most famous roles as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Miss Western in the 1963 film of Tom Jones. During her performance as Lady Bracknell, her elongated delivery of the line 'A handbag' has become synonymous with the Oscar Wilde play. By contrast, she played a downtrodden maid in The Late Christopher Bean (1933), an eccentric, impoverished old woman in The Whisperers (1967) and – one of her most celebrated roles – Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, which she played in four productions between 1926 and 1961.

Evans was born in Pimlico, London, the daughter of Edward Evans, a junior civil servant in the General Post Office, and his wife, Caroline Ellen née Foster. She had one sibling, a brother who died at the age of four. She was educated at St Michael's Church of England School, Pimlico, before being apprenticed at the age of 15 in 1903 as a milliner. She commented in later years that she loved the rich and beautiful materials of the craft, but could not manage to make two hats alike. While working in a milliner's shop in the City she began attending drama classes in Victoria; the classes developed into an amateur performing group, the Streatham Shakespeare Players, with whom she made her first stage appearance in October 1910, as Viola in Twelfth Night. In 1912, playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, she was spotted by the producer William Poel and made her first professional appearance for him in Cambridge in August of that year; she played Gautami in a 6th-century Hindu classic, Sakuntalá, in a cast including the young Nigel Playfair. Poel then cast her as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in London and subsequently at Stratford-upon-Avon. The critic of The Manchester Guardian found her diction inadequate, but otherwise approved: "Miss Edith Evans, who, without quite the invincible charm for Cressida, gave an interesting performance".

Evans's West End debut was in George Moore's Elizabeth Cooper in 1913. The play received poor notices, but Evans was praised: "In the very small part of a maid Miss Edith Evans made the success of the afternoon. She put more into her few minutes than most of our approved 'stars' can suggest in leading parts." In January 1914 she made her professional Shakespearian debut as Gertrude in Hamlet.

In 1914, at Moore's instigation, Evans was given a year's contract by the Royalty Theatre in Soho. She played character roles in comedies, as a junior member of casts that included Gladys Cooper and Lynn Fontanne. Over the next ten years she polished her craft in a wide range of parts. She played in a silent film called A Welsh Singer, directed by and featuring Henry Edwards in 1915, and also had a minor role in another 1915 film, A Honeymoon for Three, starring Charles Hawtrey. She then appeared in East is East in 1917, but thereafter made no more films for over thirty years. She toured in Shakespeare with Ellen Terry's company in 1918, appeared in light comedy alongside the young Noël Coward (Polly With a Past, 1921) and played five new Shavian roles, Lady Utterword in Heartbreak House (1921) and the Serpent, the Oracle, the She-Ancient and the ghost of the Serpent in Back to Methuselah (1923). In 1922 she made what J. T. Grein in The Illustrated London News called "a personal triumph" in Alfred Sutro's comedy The Laughing Lady.

By this time Evans was well known to the critics, and frequently received excellent notices; with her performance as Millamant in The Way of the World in 1924 she achieved wide public fame for the first time. Nigel Playfair cast her as the strong-willed and witty heroine in his revival of Congreve's Restoration comedy at the Lyric Hammersmith, in 1924. The critics resorted to superlatives:

[T]he main pleasure of the evening is due to Miss Edith Evans's Millamant, a part in which she definitely "arrives." This actress imposes herself upon the audience first of all by her Rubens-like vitality. We have always known that she can fill the stage. Physically she may have no more affinity with Congreve than a fiower-girl of Piccadilly Circus, but she has the art and the wit that transfigure the woman and give us the great lady, the coquette, the rogue, and the lover all in one. It was delicious to hear her demand to be "sole empress of her tea-table," but sublime to see her "dwindle into a wife."