Hermione Gingold

Hermione Gingold
Born	Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold 9 December 1897(1897-12-09) London, England, UK
Died	24 May 1987 (aged 89) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1909–1987
Spouse(s)	Michael Joseph (1918–1926) Eric Maschwitz (1926–1945)

Hermione Gingold (9 December 1897 – 24 May 1987) was an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric persona, an image enhanced by her sharp nose and chin, as well as her deepening voice, a result of vocal nodes which her mother encouraged her not to remove.^{[citation needed]} She starred on stage, on radio, in films, on television, and in recordings. She also appeared on the NBC interview program Here's Hollywood.

Early life

Born Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold in London, England, she was the daughter of a high-standing Vienna-born Jewish financier James Gingold and Kate Walter or Walters, an English-born housewife. Her marriage to Lionel in 1894 was conducted by the Chief Rabbi. Her paternal grandparents were the Turkish-born British subject, Moritz "Maurice" Gingold, a London stockbroker, and his Austrian-born wife, Hermine, after whom Hermione Gingold was named. On her father's side she was descended from the celebrated Solomon Sulzer, a famous synagogue cantor and Jewish liturgical composer in Vienna. Gingold was a childhood friend of Noël Coward until her mother warned her away from him.

Career

First appearing on stage in 1908 in Pinkie and the Fairies by W. Graham Robertson with Ellen Terry, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Frederick Volpe, Marie Lohr and Viola Tree. ^[1] She performed in Shakespearean dramas such as The Merchant of Venice (Old Vic 1914) and Troilus and Cressida and in 1911 worked with Charles Hawtrey as an understudy in Where the Rainbow Ends in which a young Noel Coward appeared. ^[2] In the 1930s, her quirky, ribald comedic sense became well known through musical revues. She married British publisher Michael Joseph in 1918, with whom she had two sons, Stephen and Leslie (1925). ^[3] After her divorce in 1926, she married writer and lyricist Eric Maschwitz, whom she divorced in 1945. Gingold was also known for her unruly hair. It was said she styled it by sticking her head out the window and letting the wind sculpt it.

Gingold was introduced to U.S. servicemen during World War II through the London revue Sweet and Low. After moving to the United States in 1951, her first engagement was at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in It's About Time, a revue which incorporated some of her London material. ^[2] In December 1953, she opened in John Murray Anderson's Almanac which made her an instant Broadway success and for which she won the Donaldson Award in 1954. ^[2] She won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1958 movie Gigi in which she played Madame Alvarez, Gigi's loving grandmother. She sang "I Remember it Well" with Maurice Chevalier. In Chevalier's biography by Michael Freedland she said "It was my first American film and I was very nervous," But Maurice put her at ease. "I had to sing and I hadn't got a great voice, but with him I felt the greatest prima donna in the world."

She succeeded Jo Van Fleet as the monstrously possessive mother who is driving her son crazy in Jewish American playwright Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1963) on Broadway and also in London, which role was played in the 1967 film by Rosalind Russell.

Gingold played the mayor's snooty wife Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn in The Music Man (1962) (in which her son Roy Dean (Leslie Joseph) also had a small role), ^[3] starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, and was part of the original 1973 Broadway cast of A Little Night Music in the role of the elderly Madame Armfeldt, a former courtesan, this time Swedish, which she reprised in the unsuccessful film version of the musical.

In 1977, with conductor Karl Böhm, she won a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals. She was a regular guest on television talk shows, especially Jack Paar's, where audiences loved her stories.

Quotations

• "Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue."
• "It would appear that I have tried everything except incest and folkdancing."^[4]
• "The trouble with me is that I'm not considered an actress anymore. I'm a celebrity." ^[2]
• "I suppose I shall drop dead in the theater, to a full house, I hope." ^[2]

Death

While touring as the narrator in the Stephen Sondheim compilation show Side By Side By Sondheim she tripped and fell at a railway station and became bedridden. She died shortly afterwards of heart problems and pneumonia in 1987 at the age of 89.^[2] She was entombed in a crypt in the Great Mausoleum in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.

Legacy

Her autobiography How to Grow Old Disgracefully was published posthumously in 1988. It had previously been published in instalments - The World Is Square (1946), My Own Unaided Work (1952) and Sirens Should Be Seen and Not Heard (1963). She also wrote a play Abracadabra and contributed original material to the many reviews in which she performed. ^[2]

Filmography

References

External links

• Hermione Gingold at the Internet Movie Database
• Hermione Gingold at the Internet Broadway Database
• Selected performances listed in Theatre Archive University of Bristol
• Hermione Gingold at Find a Grave
• Hermione Gingold -Foosie focuses on her revues