Hermione Baddeley

Hermione Youlanda Ruby Clinton-Baddeley was born on 13 November 1906 in Broseley, Shropshire, to composer William Herman Clinton-Baddeley and his French wife, Louise Bourdin. A descendant of British General Sir Henry Clinton, who served during the American War of Independence, Baddeley came from a family with deep artistic and intellectual roots. Her elder sister, Angela Baddeley, pursued a parallel acting career, and her cousin was the playwright V.C. Clinton-Baddeley. Her half-brother, William Baddeley, took a different path entirely, becoming a Church of England clergyman who rose to serve as Dean of Brisbane and Rural Dean of Westminster.

Baddeley made her professional stage debut in 1923, appearing in Charles McEvoy's The Likes of Her in London's West End. She built her early reputation in revue throughout the 1930s and 1950s, frequently sharing the stage with actress Hermione Gingold. Among their collaborations was Noël Coward's comedy Fallen Angels, part of a long professional relationship Baddeley maintained with Coward across many productions during the 1940s and 1950s. She was known for portraying brash, vulgar characters, a quality that defined much of her stage and screen work.

Her film career began in the 1920s and extended across several decades. She appeared in Brighton Rock (1948), playing Ida, a central character whose investigation into a friend's disappearance puts her in conflict with the film's anti-hero Pinkie. Further screen credits included Passport to Pimlico (1949), Tom Brown's Schooldays (1951), Scrooge (1951), in which she portrayed Mrs. Cratchit, The Pickwick Papers (1952), and The Belles of St Trinian's (1954). Her performance as Simone Signoret's closest friend in Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959) earned her both an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and a BAFTA Award nomination for Best British Actress. Notably, her screen time in that film amounted to two minutes and nineteen seconds, making it the shortest performance ever nominated for an Academy Award. In 1964, she appeared in two major productions: the Disney film Mary Poppins, in which she played Ellen the maidservant, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. She later provided the voice of Madame Adelaide Bonfamille in Disney's animated feature The Aristocats (1970) and contributed voice work to The Secret of NIMH (1982).

Baddeley's Broadway career spanned from 1960 to 1982. She appeared in A Taste of Honey, Canterbury Tales, and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, and starred in Whodunnit. Her performance in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore brought her a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1963.

American television audiences came to know Baddeley through appearances on Bewitched, Batman, Wonder Woman, Little House on the Prairie, and other series. Her most sustained television role was that of Nell Naugatuck, the second housekeeper to the title character on Maude, a performance that earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Television Series in 1975.

In her personal life, Baddeley married English aristocrat David Tennant in 1928, arriving an hour late to the ceremony. The couple had a daughter, Pauline Laetitia Tennant, born in 1927, and a son, David, before divorcing in 1937. In 1940 she married Major John Henry Willis of the 12th Lancers, son of Major-General Edward Willis, Lieutenant Governor of Jersey; that marriage also ended in divorce, in 1946. She later had a relationship with actor Laurence Harvey, who was twenty-two years her junior and proposed marriage, an offer she declined on account of the age difference. Baddeley was known for her devotion to animals and dedicated her autobiography, The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley, to her pet dog.

She died on 19 August 1986, at the age of seventy-nine, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles following a series of strokes. Her remains were returned to the United Kingdom for burial.