Alice Brady

Alice Brady, born Mary Rose Brady on November 2, 1892, in New York City, was an American actress whose career spanned stage and film over nearly three decades. Her father, William A. Brady, was a prominent theatrical producer, and her stepmother was actress Grace George, whom her father married when Alice was a child. Her mother, French actress Rose Marie René, died in 1896, when Brady was three years old. Her half-brother was William A. Brady Jr., the son of her father and Grace George. Brady first stepped onto a stage at age fourteen and secured her first Broadway job in 1911 at eighteen, appearing in a production associated with her father.

Brady's stage debut came in New Haven in 1911, when she performed in the operetta The Balkan Princess under the billing Mary Rose. Her Broadway career extended from 1911 to 1932 and encompassed a wide range of productions, including Mademoiselle Marni, Sour Grapes, The Hot Mikado, and Madame Pompadour. Her first major career breakthrough arrived in 1912, when she originated the role of Meg March in the Broadway and national touring productions of Marian de Forest's Little Women, adapted from the novel by Louisa May Alcott. In 1913, she appeared alongside John Barrymore in A Thief for a Night, adapted by P. G. Wodehouse and John Stapleton from Wodehouse's novel A Gentleman of Leisure, at McVicker's Theatre in Chicago. Brady continued performing on Broadway consistently for the following two decades, frequently in productions her father staged. In 1931, she appeared in the premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra.

Parallel to her stage work, Brady pursued a film career beginning in 1914, when she made her first silent feature appearance in As Ye Sow. Over the next ten years she appeared in 53 films while continuing to perform on stage, a practicable arrangement given that the film industry at the time was centered in New York. In 1923 she stepped away from film to focus exclusively on stage acting, and did not return to the screen until 1933, when MGM's When Ladies Meet became her first talking picture. From that point she worked in film frequently, completing another 25 pictures over seven years. Her final film was Young Mr. Lincoln in 1939.

Among her most recognized screen performances was her portrayal of the flighty mother of Carole Lombard's character in My Man Godfrey (1936), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, her portrayal of Mrs. Molly O'Leary, a fictionalized version of Catherine O'Leary, in In Old Chicago (1938) earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. A long-circulated story held that Brady's award, which at the time took the form of a plaque rather than a statuette, was stolen by an impostor who accepted it on her behalf at the ceremony and was never recovered, with the Academy subsequently issuing a replacement. However, contemporary press accounts indicate that the film's director, Henry King, accepted the award on her behalf, and that friends later delivered it to Brady's home. Oscar historian Olivia Rutigliano noted in 2016 that Brady, like other winners, received a blank award at the ceremony and returned it to the Academy for engraving, a practice that may have contributed to the replacement story. In 1960, Brady received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to film, located at 6201 Hollywood Boulevard.

In her personal life, Brady was married to actor James Crane from 1919 to 1922. The two appeared together in three silent films: His Bridal Night (1919), Sinners (1920), and A Dark Lantern (1920). They had one child, Donald. Brady died from cancer on October 28, 1939, five days before her forty-seventh birthday, having worked until six months before her death. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York.