Career Highlights: Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble, The Shop Around the Corner
First Major Screen Credit: Anne of Green Gables (1934)
Biography
The daughter of stage and film actress Charlotte Walker, Sara Haden's own theatrical work included several seasons with Walter Hampden's Shakespearean Repertory Company. She entered films in 1934 with a character role in the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Spitfire. The majority of her screen characterizations were as stern schoolteachers, town gossips and harried secretaries. Sara Haden is most familiar to filmgoers for her portrayal of spinsterish, ever-disapproving Aunt Millie in MGM's Andy Hardy series of the 1930s and 1940s; indeed, her final screen appearance was in the 1958 "revival" picture Andy Hardy Comes Home. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
She was born November 17, 1899 (some sources say 1897) in Galveston, Texas. Haden was the daughter of another character actress, Charlotte Walker, who was active in silent films and early talkies. Haden made her film debut in 1934 (one year after her mother's retirement) in the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Spitfire. Haden later became a MGM contract player in the late 1930s and had smallish roles in many of the studios films, most notably in the Andy Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney cast as the spinsterish Aunt Milly Forrest.
Haden made her last film in 1958 but was active on television up until a 1965 guest spot on Dr. Kildare. She was most notable for her stern, humorless characterisations such as a truant officer in Shirley Temple's Captain January (1936) yet she could play sweet, gentle characters, notably the much-loved teacher Miss Pipps who is unjustly fired in the Our Gang comedy Come Back, Miss Pipps (1941).