Jessie Ralph

Jessie Ralph Patton, born Jessie Chambers on November 5, 1864, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was an American stage and screen actress whose career spanned more than six decades. The thirteenth child of sailing captain James Chambers and his wife, Ralph began her professional acting life in stock theater in 1880 at the age of sixteen. She married actor William Patton on August 21, 1901, in Manhattan; the couple remained together until his death and had no children.

Ralph's Broadway career extended from 1906 to 1932. Her debut on the New York stage came with The Kreutzer Sonata in 1906, and her final Broadway appearance was in The Good Earth in 1932. Among the productions she appeared in during those years were Paolo and Francesca, Twelfth Night, Child of Manhattan, and The Road to Rome.

Her work in film began in 1915, when she appeared in two-reel productions made in New York. Ralph did not relocate to Hollywood until 1933, by which point she was nearly seventy years old. The age at which she arrived in Hollywood shaped the nature of her screen work, as her roles were largely confined to matronly characters. From 1933 to 1941 she appeared in 55 films, with 11 of them released in 1935 alone. Her screen credits included Nurse Pegotty in David Copperfield (1935), Nanine, the maid to Greta Garbo's character, in Camille (1936), Aunt Katherine in After the Thin Man (1936) opposite Myrna Loy, and Mrs. Hermosillo Brunch, the mother-in-law of W.C. Fields's character, in The Bank Dick (1940).

Ralph retired from Hollywood in 1941 following the amputation of her leg. She died on May 30, 1944, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-nine, and was interred at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.