Edna May Oliver

Edna May Oliver (born Edna May Nutter, November 9, 1883, in Malden, Massachusetts; died November 9, 1942) was an American actress whose career spanned Broadway and Hollywood film. The daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Oliver left school at fourteen to pursue work in the theater. She went on to become one of the most recognizable character actresses in American cinema during the 1930s, frequently cast as sharp-tongued, acerbic spinsters.

Oliver's Broadway career ran from 1916 to 1932. Among her earliest notable stage appearances was the 1917 musical comedy Oh, Boy!, featuring music by Jerome Kern, in which she played the hero's comically dour Aunt Penelope. In 1923 she took on the role of Hannah in the Broadway production of Owen Davis's play Icebound, a role she subsequently reprised in William C. De Mille's silent film adaptation the following year. Two years later, in 1925, Oliver appeared in The Cradle Snatchers alongside Mary Boland, Gene Raymond, and Humphrey Bogart. She also appeared on Broadway in the plays Isabel and In His Arms, among other productions.

Her most celebrated stage work came in 1927, when she originated the role of Parthy, wife of Cap'n Andy Hawks, in the landmark musical Show Boat. Oliver returned to the role in the 1932 Broadway revival of the production. When the opportunity arose to play Parthy in the 1936 film version of Show Boat, she declined in order to portray the Nurse in that year's film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

Oliver made her film debut in 1923 in Wife in Name Only. She first attracted significant attention in Hollywood through a series of comedies featuring the team of Wheeler and Woolsey, beginning with Half Shot at Sunrise in 1930, her first picture under contract to RKO Radio Pictures. Though typically cast in featured supporting parts, she headlined ten films, among them Fanny Foley Herself (1931) and Ladies of the Jury (1932). She played the wealthy, domineering Aunt March in the 1933 adaptation of Little Women, and appeared in noncomedic films including Cimarron (1931) and Ann Vickers (1933).

Oliver's most commercially successful starring vehicles at RKO were a series of mystery-comedies in which she played spinster detective Hildegarde Withers, a character drawn from Stuart Palmer's novels. The series ended when she departed RKO for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1935; RKO subsequently attempted to continue the franchise with Helen Broderick and later ZaSu Pitts in the role. At MGM, producer David O. Selznick cast Oliver in two Dickens adaptations released in 1935: as the prim and acidic Miss Pross in A Tale of Two Cities, starring Ronald Colman, and as the eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield.

Her later film work included a role in the Shirley Temple vehicle Little Miss Broadway (1938), in which she played a hotel landlord seeking to shut down a residence for vaudevillians. In 1939 she appeared in two musical films: Second Fiddle, with Tyrone Power and Sonja Henie, and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical, in which she played the agent of the title characters. That same year she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Drums Along the Mohawk. In 1940 she played Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the domineering aunt of Mr. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice opposite Laurence Olivier. Her final film role came in 1941, as Merle Oberon's grandmother in Lydia.

In radio, Oliver was a regular cast member on The Arkansas Traveler, the Bob Burns series, from 1941 to 1942, frequently playing an offbeat nurse. On July 7, 1942, she began a summer radio series called The Remarkable Miss Tuttle, in which she played the lead character Josephine Tuttle. She became ill during the planned thirteen-week run, and her friend Mary Boland assumed the role. When it became clear Oliver could not return, the program was retitled The Remarkable Miss Crandall, with Boland continuing in a revised lead role; that version ran for two weeks before the series was replaced by Mayor of the Town, starring Lionel Barrymore.

Oliver died on her fifty-ninth birthday, November 9, 1942, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital following a diagnosis of abdominal cancer. She was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.