Lucile Watson

Lucile Watson
from the trailer for Waterloo Bridge (1940). note her name is spelled incorrectly.
Born	May 27, 1879(1879-05-27) Quebec City, Canada
Died	June 24, 1962 (aged 83) New York City, U.S.

Lucile Watson (27 May 1879 – 24 June 1962) was a Canadian actress.

Career

Watson began her career on the stage debuting on Broadway in the play Hearts Aflame in 1902. Her next play was The Girl With Green Eyes, the first of several Clyde Fitch stories. At the end of 1903 Lucile appeared in Fitch's "Glad of It". This play featured several young performers including Lucile who would move on to major Broadway or motion picture prominence; Robert Warwick, John Barrymore, Thomas Meighan and Grant Mitchell to say the least. For the rest of the decade she appeared in several more Fitch stories into the 1910s as Fitch would die in 1909. Sometime in the 1910s she was briefly married to silent film star Rockliffe Fellows. Watson in her youth had an ordinate beauty but with a stern expression on her face. Photos taken during her Broadway years show a look that movie audiences would become accustomed to. It is not known if she cultivated this look for films or that she wanted to ward off a lot of male attention to her subtle beauty. Watson's first film role was in the 1916 silent film The Girl with Green Eyes, a film version of the Clyde Fitch play she had performed in on Broadway in 1902. . She did not appear in another movie until 1930, when she had an uncredited role in The Royal Family of Broadway. Her marriage to Fellows produced no children.

Watson was primarily a stage actress, starring in such plays as Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, Heartbreak House, Ghosts, The Importance of Being Earnestand Pride and Prejudice. Her second husband was playwright Louis E. Shipman whom she married in 1928. She was widowed in 1933.

Lucile reached the height of her adult acting career in playwright Lillian Hellman's anti-fascist war dramatic stageplay "Watch on the Rhine" on Broadway in 1941, starring the gifted Hungarian-born Paul Lukas. Two years later in Hollywood, she and Lukas preserved their brilliance in the Hellman's film version. Film directors Herman Shumlin & Hal Mohr brilliantly cast Bette Davis in the lead of Watch on the Rhine (1943), and earned Paul Lukas the Academy Award for Best Actor. In perhaps her best known film role, Lucile Watson's performance as 'Mrs. Fanny Farrelly' was also acknowledged with a nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in her matriarchal supporting effort, but lost to Greek-born actress Katina Paxinou for her performance as 'Pilar' (her first film role) in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).

Other notabe movies included The Garden of Allah (1936), The Women (1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Great Lie (1941), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), The Razor's Edge (1946), Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), Song of the South (1946), That Wonderful Urge (1948) and Little Women (1949), and her last feature film role as 'Aunt Eula Beaurevel' in My Forbidden Past (1951).

Death

Lucile Watson died on June 25, 1962, after suffering a heart attack at age 83. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lucile Watson

• Lucile Watson at the Internet Movie Database
• Lucile Watson at Internet Broadway Database
• Lucile Watson portraits Broadway 1910s or 20s NYP Library
• Lucile Watson at the Findagrave

Sources

• Lucile Watson biography by Film historian T. R. Bourgeois