Laura Hope Crews

Laura Hope Crews (December 12, 1879 – November 12, 1942) was an American actress born in San Francisco, California, whose career spanned stage and screen across more than four decades. The daughter of stage actress Angelena Lockwood and backstage carpenter John Thomas Crews, she had three older siblings and began performing at the age of four, with her first stage appearance taking place at Woodward's Gardens. Her formal education was largely completed in San Jose, where the family relocated after her mother remarried. She paused her acting career to finish school before returning to the stage in 1898. Records pertaining to her early life in San Francisco were destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906.

Crews launched her professional career in 1898 as an ingenue with the Alcazar Stock Company in San Francisco. Two years later, she and her mother relocated to New York City, where she began working with the Henry V. Donnelly Stock Company. Her Broadway career extended from 1903 to 1941 and encompassed a wide range of productions. Among the playwrights who took notice of her work was A.A. Milne, who was particularly impressed by her performance in his Mr. Pim Passes By in 1921, a production that ran for 232 performances on Broadway. In 1924 she starred in The Werewolf, which achieved a run of 112 Broadway performances.

One of her most distinguished stage credits came in 1925, when she starred as Judith Bliss in the original Broadway production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever, which she co-directed alongside Coward himself. The following year she appeared in The Silver Cord, written by Sidney Howard and produced by the New York Theater Guild, a production that ran for 212 performances. During periods when The Silver Cord was not being performed, matinee performances of Luigi Pirandello's Right You Are If You Think You Are filled the schedule. Additional Broadway credits included Her Master's Voice, Blackbirds, The Great Divide, Brown of Harvard, and Jubilee.

Beyond the stage, Crews built a substantial career in film, particularly as a character actress during the 1930s. She reprised her stage role of the mother in the 1933 RKO film adaptation of The Silver Cord, which co-starred Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, and Irene Dunne. Director George Cukor, who had worked with her on Camille in 1936, recommended her for the role of Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind (1939) after Billie Burke declined the part. Cukor envisioned the performance in what he described as a Billie Burke-ish manner, with the same zany feeling. Crews became the first credited cast member of Gone with the Wind to die. In the late 1920s, her extensive stage experience also led Gloria Swanson to hire her as a voice coach to assist with the transition to talking pictures.

Crews made her final stage appearance in 1942 in the original Broadway run of Arsenic and Old Lace, joining the production as a replacement for one of the original cast members. She remained with the show for more than a year and a half, both on Broadway and with a touring company, before illness forced her to withdraw. She died later that year at the LeRoy Sanitarium in New York City following an illness of four months, with some sources attributing the cause to kidney failure. She was interred at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. Crews is honored with a star at 6251 Hollywood Boulevard on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.