Hollywood Actors Archives - Page 18 of 126

John Dall

IMDB Entry:

John Dall was born John Dall Thompson (some sources state John Jenner Thompson) on May 26, 1918. He made his Broadway debut in Norman Krasna‘s comedy “Dear Ruth,” directed by Moss Hart, in 1944. The show was a hit, running for over a year and a half and 680 performances.

He next appeared on Broadway in Jean-Paul Sartre‘s “Red Gloves” in 1948. The show ran for 113 performances. Dall’s penultimate stint on Broadway, in the 1950 revival of “The Heiress”, was a flop, closing after 16 performances. He had the role of the callow fortune hunter Morris Townsend, played so memorably by Montgomery Clift in William Wyler‘s 1949 movie version, The Heiress (1949).

Dall received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for The Corn Is Green (1945), his first movie. He reached the height of his movie career in 1948, playing one of the two students modeled after the 1920s’ thrill killers Leopold & Loeb in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope(1948). Unfortunately for Dall, “Rope” was a flop. The other role for which he is best remembered, the firearms fetishist in Gun Crazy (1950) (better known by its reissue title, “Gun Crazy,” the name of the short story the movie was based on), earned him a place in the film noir pantheon. It was a B-movie and, like “Rope,” also flopped. The only prominent film he appeared in subsequently was Stanley Kubrick–Kirk Douglas‘ Spartacus(1960) in 1960, which–like “Gun Crazy”–was scripted by Dalton Trumbo, the most famous member of the Hollywood 10.

Dall, whose career started out so promisingly in the 1940s, getting an Oscar nod for his movie debut, never gained any traction. He appeared in only eight movies from 1945 to 1961, though he did many TV acting gigs. He died in 1971, reportedly of a heart attack but possibly from complications from a punctured lung.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

IMDB entry:

She was born Edna May Nutter, a child of solid New England stock, on 9th November 1883 in Malden, Massachusetts. The daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Edna was a descendant of the 6th American president John Quincy Adams. Miss Oliver took an early interest in the stage, and she would quit school at the age of 14 to pursue her ambitions in the theater.

Despite abandoning traditional schooling, Edna continued to study the performing arts, including speech and piano. One of her first jobs was as pianist with an all female orchestra which toured America around the turn of the century. By 1917 she had achieved success on Broadway in the hit play “Oh, Boy”. By 1923 she had appeared in her first film. . Edna May Oliver seems to have been born to play the classics of American and British literature. Some of her most memorable film roles were in adaptations of works of Charles Dickens. Although some have described her as plain or “horse faced”, Edna May Oliver’s comedic talents lent a beautiful droll warmth to her characters. She was usually called upon to play less glamorous roles such as a spinsters, but she played them with such soul, wit, and depth that to this day she remains one of the best loved of Hollywood’s character actresses. A fine example of her comedic talent can be found inLaugh and Get Rich (1931). Here we find her playing a role almost autobiographical in nature, that of a proud woman with Boston roots who has married “down”. As the plot unwinds, she is invited to a society gala despite her modest circumstances. At the gala she becomes tipsy. With a frolicsome air Edna May seems to use the role to gently mock her real self. Her slightly drunk character seizes upon a bit of flattery, and alluding to her old New England family, proudly proclaims to each who will listen, “I am a Cranston. That explains everything!”. In real life, Edna May Oliver was a Nutter, and perhaps that explains everything. Edna May Oliver married stock broker David Pratt in 1928, but the marriage ended in divorce five years later. In 1939 she received an Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Widow McKlennar in the picture Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). That was to be one of her last films. Miss Oliver was struck ill in August of 1942. Although she seemed to recover briefly, she was re-admitted to Los Angeles’s Cedars of Lebanon hospital in October Her dear friend actress Virginia Hammond flew out from New York to stay by her bedside. Edna May Oliver died on her 59th birthday, 9th November 1942.Virginia Hammond was with her and said, “She died without ever being aware of the gravity of her condition. She just went peacefully asleep.”

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Thomas McWilliams <tgm@netcom.com>

The abve IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

“Movies Unlimited” article:

Oh yes, I’m grateful in a way for this face, now that I’ve gotten used to it. I know it’s brought me this success. I know it’s given me the chance to make and save enough money so I won’t spend the end of my days in an old ladies’ home somewhere. But all the same I’m a woman, and what woman doesn’t long to be beautiful?” Well, her visage may not have been the kind that made the covers of movie fan magazines, but filmgoers in the 1930s looked forward to the on-screen appearances of Edna May Oliver, the dour-faced performer whose grand dame attitude served her equally well in dozens of comedic and dramatic turns, usually as a spinster or sarcastic busybody.

That haughty New England demeanor came naturally to the actress, born Edna May Nutter in Malden, Massachusetts in 1883 (she was a descendant on her father’s side of U.S. president John Quincy Adams). It was, perhaps, her father’s desire that she be a singer that inspired the young Edna to become a performer, but his death when she was 14 put any such plans on hold, and she left school to work for a dressmaker. Two years later, an uncle helped her land a position with an outdoor light opera troupe.

Oliver had her indoor stage debut in a 1911 Boston stock company production of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and in 1916 she made the move to New York. The first Broadway part, in a drama entitled The Master, required her to pay for her own costumes (her sewing experience must have come in handy!) and left her with, as she put it, “about two cents a week.” Edna received good notices–and a bigger salary–as Aunt Penelope in the 1917 Jerome Kern musical/comedy Oh, Boy!, but bigger things came in 1923. That year she got her first film role, as the heroine’s mother in the melodrama Wife in Name Only, and on Broadway she played a servant in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound (she’d appear in the movie version in 1924). Over the next several years Edna was seen in various stage shows (including 1925’s The Cradle Snatchers, with Mary Boland and a young Humphrey Bogart, and the original 1927 production of Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat) and she worked in silent films at Paramount’s Astoria, New York studio. She also found the time to get married to stockbroker David Pratt in 1928, although the couple would separate shortly thereafter and divorce in 1933.

Movie audiences first got to hear Edna’s distinctive voice in the 1929 Clara Bow comedy The Saturday Night Kid, and the following year Oliver made Hollywood her permanent home when she signed a contract with RKO. She would serve as a Margaret Dumont-style authority figure to that studio’s reigning kings of comedy,Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, in three films: Half Shot at Sunrise (1930), Cracked Nuts (1931) and Hold ‘Em Jail (1932). In between she appeared in 1931’s Best Picture Academy Award-winner, the frontier saga Cimarron, as a very prim schoolteacher; was top-billed alongside “Woo Woo!” funnyman Hugh Herbert in Laugh and Get Rich that same year; and in 1932 ran roughshod on her fellow jurors as she tried to prove an ex-showgirl innocent of murdering her wealthy husband in the courtroom comedy Ladies of the Jury.

It may have been the Ladies of the Jury role that led RKO to headline Oliver as author Stuart Palmer’s New York teacher-turned-amateur sleuth, Miss Hildegarde Withers, in a series of light-hearted whodunits, beginning with 1932’s Penguin Pool Murder. When a field trip to the aquarium with her racially-mixed class of grade schoolers leads to the discovery of a stockbroker’s corpse in the title exhibit, the umbrella-wielding, tart-tongued Withers (“I’m a schoolteacher, and I might have done wonders with you if I’d caught you young enough.”) ingratiates herself with Police Inspector Piper (James Gleason) as she horns in on his investigation. The banter between Oliver and Gleason so delighted moviegoers that the studio re-teamed them for two more Withers mysteries: 1934’s Murder on the Blackboard, set in the heroine’s own school, and 1935’s Murder on a Honeymoon, which found Hildegarde vacationing on Catalina Island (Say, just how much did schoolteachers make during the Depression?). After Edna left RKO for MGM, the series continued with Helen Broderick, then ZaSu Pitts, playing Withers, but neither actress caught on with the public in the role.

Her aristocratic mien and knack for shifting from comical to serious in an instant made Oliver an indispensable part of many studios’ literary adaptations. She was memorable as Aunt March opposite Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett in RKO’s 1933 version of Little Women, and later that year played the Red Queen in Paramount’s lavish, all-star rendition of Alice in Wonderland. As stern-hearted Aunt Betsey, Edna came to love nephew David Copperfield (Freddie Bartholomew) in the 1935 MGM movie of the Dickens novel, and she co-starred as the fiercely loyal Miss Pross alongside Ronald Colman and Elizabeth Allan in another Metro Dickens filming from 1935, A Tale of Two Cities. 1936 found Oliver going Shakespearean, playing Norma Shearer’s devoted nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and one of her final roles was as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in 1940’s Pride and Prejudice.

Along the way she also gave fine support to such stars as Joan Crawford (No More Ladies in 1936), Clark Gable (1937’s Parnell), Nelson Eddy (Rosalie, also 1937), and even Shirley Temple (1938’s Little Miss Broadway), who–like Bartholomew–was able to melt her icy exterior. It was as the feisty Widow McKlennar–opposite Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert in director John Ford’s 1939 Revolutionary War epic Drums Along the Mohawk–that Oliver received her first and only Academy Award nomination, but she would lose the Best Supporting Actress statue that year to Gone with the Wind’s Hattie McDaniel. And Edna’s unmistakable inflection and (to be charitable) bottom-heavy build made her a favorite for animators from the Disney and Warner studios to put in their cartoons, including Mickey’s Polo Team (1936) and Porky’s Road Race (1937).

Oliver’s final film work was for producer Alexander Korda in the 1941 drama Lydia, in which she played the hypochondriac grandmother (“The NERVE of him, telling me my liver is perfect!,” she says of a doctor) of title heroine Merle Oberon. Ironically, the actress would develop an intestinal disorder that worsened over the next year, and would claim Oliver on her 59th birthday in November of 1942. One can almost hear Edna at the pearly gates, saying to St. Peter in her haughtiest and most indignant tone, “Take me on my birthday? The NERVE!”

The above “Movies Unlimited” article can also be accessed online here.

Josephine Hutchinson

Date of Birth	12 October 1903, Seattle, Washington, USA
Date of Death	4 June 1998, New York City, New York, USA

As a child she studied at Seattle’s Cornish School. Still in her early twenties, after several years of stock work in New York, she joined Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater where she won critical praise for her title role in “Alice in Wonderland.” She came to Hollywood in 1934 under contract with Warners, debuting in “Happiness Ahead”. She co-starred with Paul Muni in “The Story of Louis Pasteur” (1936) and played in many small roles, both in films – e.g., the phoney U.N. ambassador’s wife in North by Northwest(1959) – and television (“Twilight Zone, ” “Gunsmoke”, “Perry Mason”) in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. She died at Manhattan’s Florence Nightingale Nursing Home, aged 94.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>

Fred Allen

IMDB entry:

Fred Allen, the well-known comedian who went on to star in radio, television, and film, was born John Florence Sullivan in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1894 and educated at Boston University. His Broadway shows include “The Passing Show of 1922” and “The Greenwich Village Follies”.

He produced, wrote,and starred in a network radio show entitled at various times “Linit Bath Club Revue”, Town Hall Tonight”, Texaco Star Theater” and finally “The Fred Allen Show” from 1932 to 1949. He was also a semi-regular on the network radio program “The Big Show” from 1950 to 1952. He was a frequent guest on “The Jack Benny Program”. Jack and Fred, good friends in real life, had an accidental on air feud that begin in 1936 and lasted off and on until Fred Allen’s passing.

On television, he was one of the regular rotating hosts of the Colgate Comedy Hour (1950), but did not renew his initial contract due to health reasons. He also starred on television’s “Judge for Yourself” from 1953 to 1954 and was a regular panelist on What’s My Line” from 1954 until his death.

He appeared in such films as “Thanks a Million”, “Love Thy Neighbor”, “Sally, Irene, and Mary”, and “It’s in the Bag”.

He wrote two autobiographies. The first,about his days in radio, published in 1954, entitled “Treadmill to Oblivion”. The second, about his days in vaudeville, was published after his death by his wife Portland Hoffa, entitled “Much Ado About Me.” (1956). Fred was in the process of completing the final chapter at the time of his death. Also always known as an avid letter writer, a collection of these entitled “Fred Allen’s Letters” was published in 1966.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Matt Dicker

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Ed Gargan

Edward Gargan was born on July 17, 1902 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Great Guy (1936), Wonder Man (1945) and Flying with Music(1942). He was married to Catherine Conlan. He died on February 19, 1964 in New York City.

Scott Brady

IMDB entry:

He had the manly good looks and rugged appeal to make it to top stardom in Hollywood and succeeded quite well as a sturdy leading man of standard action on film and TV. Born in Brooklyn on September 13, 1924, Irish-American Scott Brady was christened Gerard Kenneth Tierney (called Jerry) by parents Lawrence and Maria Tierney. His father, chief of New York’s aqueduct police force, had always had show business intentions and later did print work after retiring from the force. Both Scott’s older and younger brothers, Lawrence Tierney and Edward Tierney went on to become actors as well. Lawrence’s promising film noir “bad guy” career was sabotaged by a severe drinking disorder that led to numerous skirmishes with the law. Scott himself faced a narcotics charge in 1957 (charges were dropped, Scott maintained that he was framed) and later (1963) was involved in illegal bookmaking activities. Fortunately, Scott was more cool-headed and wound up avoiding the pitfalls that befell his older brother, making a very lucrative living for himself in Hollywood throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.

Scott grew up in Westchester County and attended Roosevelt and St. Michael’s High Schools. Like his older brother Lawrence, Scott he was an all-round athlete in school and earned letters for basketball, football and track and expressed early designs on becoming a football coach or radio announcer. Instead he enlisted before graduating from high school and served as a naval aviation mechanic overseas. During his term of duty he earned a light heavyweight boxing medal. He was discharged in 1946 and decided to head for Los Angeles where his older brother Lawrence was making encouraging strides as an actor. Toiling in menial jobs as a cabbie and day-time laborer, the handsome, blue-eyed looker was noticed having lunch in a café by producer Hal B. Wallis and offered a screen test. The test did not fare well but, not giving up, he enrolled in the Bliss-Hayden drama school under his G.I. Bill, studied acting, and managed to rid himself of his thick Brooklyn accent.

He signed with a minor league studio, Eagle-Lion, and made his debut of sorts in the poverty-row programmer In This Corner (1948) utilizing his boxing skills from his early days in the service. He showed more promise with his second and third films Canon City(1948) and He Walked by Night (1948), the latter as a detective who aids in nabbing psychotic killer Richard Basehart. Scott switched over to higher-grade action stories for Fox and Universal over time. Westerns and crime stories would be his bread-winning genres with The Gal Who Took the West (1949) opposite Yvonne De Carlo and John Russell and Undertow (1949), with Russell again, being prime examples. He frequently switched from hero to heavy during his peak years. In one film he would romance aJeanne Crain in The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951) or a Mitzi Gaynor inBloodhounds of Broadway (1952), while in the next beat Shelley Winters to a pulp inUntamed Frontier (1952). A favorite pin-up hunk in his early years, he hit minor cult status as a bad hombre, The Dancin’ Kid, in the offbeat western Johnny Guitar (1954). He and the other manly men, however, were somewhat overshadowed in the movie by the Freudian-tinged gunplay between Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. Other roles had him sturdily handling the action scenes while giving the glance over to such diverting female costars as Barbara Stanwyck, Mala Powers and Anne Bancroft.

Scott would mark the same territory in TV — westerns and crimers — finding steadier work on the smaller screen into the 1960s. He starred as the title hero in the western series Shotgun Slade (1959). Stage too was a sporadic source of income with such productions as “The Moon Is Blue”, “Detective Story” and “Picnic” under his belt before making his Broadway bow as a slick card sharpie opposite Andy Griffith in the short-lived musical “Destry Rides Again” in 1959. He later did the national company of the heavyweight political drama “The Best Man” with his portrayal of a senator.

The seemingly one-time confirmed bachelor decided to settle down after meeting and marrying Mary Tirony in 1967 at age 43. Prior to this he had been linked with such luminous beauties as Gwen Verdon and Dorothy Malone. The couple had two sons. Parts dwindled down in size in later years and he gained considerable weight as he grew older and balder, but he still appeared here-and-there as an occasional character heavy or hard-ass cop in less-important movies such as Doctors’ Wives (1971), $ (1971), The Loners (1972) and Wicked, Wicked (1973). Minor TV roles in mini-movies also came his way at a fair pace. Towards the end he was seen in such high-profile big-screen movies as The China Syndrome (1979) and Gremlins (1984). Scott had a collapse in 1981 and was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive respiratory disease. He later relied on an oxygen tank. He died of the disease four years later and was interred at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

1990 obituary in “The Independent”:

She was stubborn, sullen, tiny (5ft 3in) and resilient. With a mink thrust over her shoulder-pads and an orchid in her hair, Ida Lupino made it clear – in a silky, querulous voice – that she resented living in a man’s world. Like Joan Crawford, she was glamorous in different ways at different times in her career: she too had a strong, mesmerising personality but with a wider range. She was the archetypal Hollywood star, always surging back after a setback.

She was born into a family of Italian origin which had entertained the British for generations in circuses and variety theatres. Her father was Stanley Lupino, star of film and stage musicals. Ida was only 15 when she made her first film, Her First Affaire (1933), cast as a teenage vamp, so there was some surprise when Paramount signed her to play Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Once in Hollywood, Paramount changed its collective mind about her, and for the next four years she was shuttled between roles of her own age, ingenues and glamourpants parts for which she was much too young.

In 1938 she married the actor Louis Hayward. Hayward had also been getting nowhere fast in Hollywood, but at this time the producer Edward Small decided that he had star potential, which in turn made Lupino more aggressive towards her own career. She convinced the director William A. Wellman that only she could play the cockney whore who inspires Helder (Ronald Colman) in The Light That Failed (1939), based on Kipling’s first novel.

Her emotive handling of a difficult role convinced Warner Bros that they had found someone to fill Bette Davis’s old shoes, for they were planning a partial remake of Bordertown called They Drive By Night (1940). It was a showy role, lasciviously pursuing trucker George Raft while showing only contempt for her fond, much older husband, Alan Hale, who is (of course) his boss and best friend; furthermore, it required her to go spectacularly mad on the witness stand at the climax. Jack Warner was so impressed by the first few days’ rushes that he signed Lupino to a seven-year contract, whereupon she stayed off work on the advice of her astrologer. Warner devotes almost a chapter to this in his memoirs, but he seems to have persuaded himself that this was how real stars behave, for he gave her billing over Bogart in her next film, Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), despite the fact that she has the lesser role (as Bogart’s moll).

Warner had had trouble with Davis, whose temperament (in the cause of better material) was equalled only by her talent and her popularity. Lupino accordingly had value to Warner beyond the unexpected maturing of her abilities: she was a “threat” to Davis, at worst replacing her as his leading female star – or appearing in the many properties purchased for Davis in the first place.

Lupino held her own against such heavyweights as Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield in the best screen version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (also 1941) despite this interpolation – an ex-con picked up at sea to inflame the all-male crew. She staked her claim to be the first of the decade’s many wicked ladies at Columbia, in Ladies in Retirement (1941), as the housekeeper who conspires with her “nephew”, Hayward, to murder the blowsy ex-actress who is her boss.

She was a “Lady Macbeth of the slums” (Picturegoer) in The Hard Way (1943), stopping only at murder to ensure her daughter’s stardom – with Joan Leslie in the role. The New York critics voted Lupino’s performance the year’s best, setting the seal on her stardom.

In Devotion (1945), she was Emily Bronte, Olivia de Havilland was Charlotte and Nancy Coleman Anne, with the Italian-born Viennese-accented Paul Henried as the Irish Mr Nicholls. The critic Richard Winnington found the film “painless. It never got nearer to the subject than the names and consequently didn’t hurt.”

Lupino – and audiences – were better served by Walsh’s noir-ish The Man I Love (1946), in which she proved how effortlessly she inhabited those tough, world-weary dames, in this case a night-club singer, preparing herself for damnation to prevent her sister from throwing herself at the heel who runs the joint, Robert Alda. Even more splendid is the not dissimilar Road House (1948), with Lupino greedily suggesting the small-time ambition and essential seediness of a B-girl who has spent too many nights in an atmosphere of stale cigarette smoke and beer-guzzling – and she got to croon the torch song for which this film was famous, “Again (it mustn’t happen again)”. “She does more without a voice than anyone I’ve ever heard,” says the cashier, Celeste Holm.

It was directed at 20th Century-Fox by Jean Negulesco, invited there by Zanuck after his work with Lupino in Deep Valley (1947) which featured one of her first wholly admirable or pitiable heroines, a timid farmgirl whose life is changed by an encounter with a convict, Dane Clark. There were more to come (at various studios): a frightened bride in A Woman in Hiding (1950) – frightened of Stephen McNally, though the cast included Howard Duff, whom Lupino later married.

A little later she turned to directing – the only female director of consequence between Dorothy Arzner and Joan Micklin Silver – and chiefly for the Filmakers, a company she had founded with her then husband, Collier Young. As early as 1949 she had turned to television, writing and producing, before carrying out these same chores on a low-budget movie concerning the problems of an unwed mother, Not Wanted (1949), and she took over the direction when Elmer Clifton became ill. With the determination which characterised her work before the cameras, she went on to handle other subjects in the same serious low-key vein, including The Hitch-Hiker (1952), about a paranoid killer (William Talman) who forces two businessmen (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) to travel with him at gunpoint. This is regarded as her best film as a director. They managed to get a higher budget for another sympathetic study of a social problem, The Bigamist (1953). He was Edmond O’Brien, with Lupino and Joan Fontaine as his two wives – with a screenplay by Young, now divorced from the first lady and married to the second.

Lupino continued to act and direct in television until the Seventies, including a series with Duff, Mr Adams and Eve. In her later years she found time for a new hobby, motor-cycling.

David Shipman

Ida Lupino, actress, producer, director and writer: born London 4 February 1918; married 1938 Louis Hayward (marriage dissolved 1945), 1948 Collier Young (marriage dissolved 1951), 1951 Howard Duff (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1972): died Burbank, California 3 August 1995.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Lupino continued to act and direct in television until the Seventies, including a series with Duff, Mr Adams and Eve. In her later years she found time for a new hobby, motor-cycling.

David Shipman

The above “Indepednent” obituary can also be accessed here.

Thelma Ritter. TCM Overview.

TCM Overview:

With her salty humor, crackling New York accent and seen-it-all demeanor, Thelma Ritter was one of the most accomplished and dependable character actresses in American film.

Throughout a 21-year screen career she worked numerous variations on her standard character of a wry, salt-of-the-earth everywoman and was equally convincing as lowly maid or wealthy dowager. She performed particularly well with other actresses and was often cast as sidekick to a female star. Ritter was Oscar®-nominated six times as Best Supporting Actress but, in what seems a major injustice, never won the award itself.

Born in Brooklyn in 1902, Ritter trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and acted in stock theater and radio and in small roles on the Broadway stage before taking a break from her career to raise two children by her husband, actor/

Marion Lorne

Forever embraced as the mumbling, bumbling Aunt Clara on the Bewitched (1964) television series, endearing character actress Marion Lorne had a five-decade-long career on the stage before ever becoming a familiar TV household name.

Born Marion Lorne MacDougall on August 12, 1883 (other sources list 1885 and 1888), she grew up in her native Pennsylvania, the daughter of Scottish and English immigrants. Trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she appeared in stock shows, and was on the Broadway boards by 1905. She married English playwright Walter C. Hackett and performed in many of his plays throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including “Hyde Park Corner” and “The Gay Adventure”. They at one point settled in England where they co-founded the Whitehall Theater. It was there that Marion began to sharpen and patent her fidgety comedy eccentrics in such plays as “Pansy’s Arabian Knight,” “Sorry You’ve Been Troubled,” “Espionage” and “London After Dark”. Upon Hackett’s death in 1944, she returned to the States and again, after a brief retirement, became a hit in such tailor-made stage shows as “Harvey”.

Marion made a definitive impression via her movie debut at age 60+ in Alfred Hitchcock‘s immortal suspenser Strangers on a Train (1951) as murderer Robert Walker‘s clueless, smothering mother. Surprisingly Hollywood used her only a couple more times on film after that auspicious beginning — a grievously sad waste of a supremely talented comedienne. Marion wisely turned to TV instead and proved a dithery delight in such sitcoms as Mister Peepers (1952) and Sally (1957), gaining quirky status as well as part of the comedy ensemble on The Garry Moore Show (1958).

It was, however, her role as Elizabeth Montgomery‘s befuddled, muttering, doorknob-collecting witch-aunt on Bewitched (1964) — whether bouncing into walls or conjuring up some unintended piece of witchcraft — that put a lasting sheen on her long career. For that role she deservedly won an Emmy trophy for “Best Supporting Actress Award” — albeit posthumously. Sadly, Marion succumbed to a heart attack on May 9, 1968, just ten days before the actual ceremony. Elizabeth Montgomery gave a touching acceptance speech on her behalf.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

John Dall

Edna May Oliver

Josephine Hutchinson

Fred Allen

Ed Gargan

Scott Brady

Ida Lupino

Thelma Ritter

Thelma Ritter. TCM Overview.

Marion Lorne

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