Ethel Owen

Ethel Owen, born Ethel Marguerite Waite on March 30, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, radio, and television across more than five decades. She died on February 16, 1997, in Savannah, Georgia, six weeks before what would have been her 104th birthday.

Owen began performing around 1907, at the age of fourteen, appearing on vaudeville circuits before gravitating toward the legitimate stage, primarily with regional touring theatre companies. On June 19, 1919, she married Raymond G. Owens, a Wisconsin veterinarian, and the couple had three daughters: Mary, Virginia, and Armilda Jane. Owen continued acting under the stage name Ethel Owen, dropping the final letter from her married surname. Following her husband's death in 1926, she maintained an active professional schedule while raising her daughters. She later married insurance executive John Hale Almy on April 2, 1949; the couple resided in Bronxville, New York.

Two of Owen's daughters pursued careers in performance. Her youngest, Armilda Jane, born in Milwaukee in 1923, began acting as a child in her mother's productions and was well known in summer stock by age ten. She later adopted the stage name Pamela Britton and went on to co-starring roles on Broadway and in films, including the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh and the 1950 noir D.O.A., as well as television roles in Blondie and My Favorite Martian. Britton died in 1974 at the age of fifty from cancer. The middle daughter, Virginia, born in 1921, also adopted Owen as a stage surname and briefly worked as a film actress at RKO Pictures from 1946 to 1948, receiving an on-screen credit for the role of dance-hall girl Ginger Kelly in Thunder Mountain. Virginia married William A. Loock Jr. in 1950, with the ceremony held in Bronxville, and she died in 2011.

At the start of the 1930s, the family relocated from Milwaukee to New York City, where Owen found work in regional theatre, radio, and on Broadway. Her first Broadway credit came with Africana, a black operetta with a mixed cast that opened on November 26, 1934, at the Venice Theatre. The production received negative reviews and closed two days later on November 28. Much of Owen's professional output during the 1930s and 1940s came from radio, where the demand for experienced voice performers was substantial. She held a recurring role on Gang Busters, a police drama that ran from 1936 to 1957 and featured listener participation in the apprehension of criminals, and she also played Abbey Trowbridge in the soap opera Valiant Lady.

Owen's two remaining Broadway credits came during the 1940s. She appeared in Three's a Family, a comedy written by Phoebe and Henry Ephron and also directed by Henry Ephron, which opened at the Longacre Theatre on May 5, 1943, ran for 497 performances, transferred to the Belasco Theatre on May 28, 1944, and closed there on July 8 of that year. In 1946, she was part of the revival of Show Boat, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, which opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on January 5, 1946, eight weeks after Kern's death on November 11, 1945. Owen played Parthy Hawks, the non-singing role of the mother of Magnolia, portrayed by Jan Clayton. The production featured 115 cast members, ran for 418 performances, and closed on January 4, 1947, making it the longest-running revival of a stage musical on Broadway at that point in history.

Beginning in 1947 and 1948, Owen transitioned into television during the medium's early years. One of her earliest television appearances was in the title role of the episode "Old Lady Robbins," broadcast on November 3, 1948, as part of NBC's Kraft Television Theatre; also appearing in that production, in her first screen role, was eighteen-year-old Grace Kelly. Owen went on to perform in dramatic series including Inner Sanctum and Armstrong Circle Theatre, as well as a two-part 1954 production of David Copperfield on Robert Montgomery Presents, in which she portrayed Aunt Betsey. Between 1952 and 1957, she made frequent appearances on various incarnations of CBS's Jackie Gleason Show, earning recognition for her sketch comedy work on The Honeymooners, where she played Mrs. Gibson, Ralph Kramden's mother-in-law.

Owen gradually retired from acting in the mid-1960s upon reaching her early seventies. At the time of her death, she had outlived her first husband by nearly seventy-one years and her daughter Pamela Britton by more than two decades. Days before Owen's death, a local publication reported on a production of Brigadoon at the Contra Costa Musical Theatre in which her granddaughter, chorus member Kathy Ferber, paid tribute during the final bows to her own mother, who had performed in the original 1947 to 1948 Broadway production of that show. Ferber also acknowledged her 103-year-old grandmother in the tribute.