Katherine Squire

Katherine Squire (March 9, 1903 – March 29, 1995) was an American actress born in Defiance, Ohio, whose career spanned stage, film, and television from the 1920s through the 1980s. She attended Ohio Wesleyan University and, following graduation, began her professional acting career at the Cleveland Play House. She subsequently trained at the American Laboratory Theater in New York.

Squire's Broadway career ran from 1927 to 1958, opening with a debut in Much Ado About Nothing. Over the following decades she accumulated credits across a range of productions, including Goodbye Again (1932), Lady of Letters (1935), Three Men on a Horse (1937), Chicken Every Sunday, The Traveling Lady, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Sin of Pat Muldoon, and The Shadow of a Gunman. In 1961 she took a co-starring role in the New York production of Roots, written by Arnold Wesker.

Squire entered television in 1951 with an appearance on Pulitzer Prize Playhouse. Through the 1950s she guest starred on Goodyear Playhouse, Robert Montgomery Presents, Westinghouse Studio One, The United States Steel Hour, and Playhouse 90. In 1954 she portrayed Gertrude Harper in the CBS drama Woman with a Past, and from 1956 to 1957 she held a recurring role on the soap opera Valiant Lady.

Her feature film debut came in 1959 with the drama The Story on Page One. The following year she made two guest appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and appeared in Song Without End as the mother of Dirk Bogarde's character. On television she portrayed the title character's mother in Dr. Kildare, and between 1962 and 1963 she guest starred in two Twilight Zone episodes: "One More Pallbearer" and "In His Image." She appeared three times on Perry Mason, playing Clara Thorpe in the 1960 episode "The Case of the Credulous Quarry," Vera Hargrave in the 1964 episode "The Case of the Nervous Neighbor," and Esther Norden in the 1965 episode "The Case of the Wrongful Writ." Additional television credits from this period include The Road West, Peyton Place, and Adam-12.

In 1971 Squire co-starred in the road film Two-Lane Blacktop. Beginning in 1970 she held a recurring role on the soap opera The Doctors, and from 1974 to 1975 she appeared in a recurring capacity on Search for Tomorrow. Her final television appearance was in the 1975 Hallmark Hall of Fame film Eric, in which she played Mrs. Harris.

Squire continued working in regional and New York theater through the early 1980s. In 1979 she took a leading role in Hillbilly Women at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut. She subsequently appeared in Hedda Gabler, starring Susannah York, at the Roundabout Theater, and in Memory of Whiteness at the American Place Theater, both in New York. Her final screen credit was the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally.

On January 19, 1930, Squire married actor Byron McGrath in Cleveland; the marriage later ended in divorce. In 1940 she married actor George Mitchell, with whom she frequently collaborated on stage, in film, and on television. Mitchell died in 1972. Squire died on March 29, 1995, in Lake Hill, New York, at the age of 92.