May Robson

May Robson, born Mary Jeanette Robison on 19 April 1858 in Moama, in the Colony of New South Wales, Australia, was an actress whose career on stage and screen extended across 58 years. She is recognized as the first Australian to receive an Academy Award nomination for acting, a distinction she earned at the age of 75 for her leading role in Lady for a Day (1933). She died on 20 October 1942 at her home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 84.

Robson was the fourth child of Julia, née Schlesinger, and Henry Robison, an English-born sea captain who had served 24 years in the British Merchant Navy before retiring to Australia. Henry and Julia traveled to Melbourne, Victoria, in 1853 aboard the SS Great Britain. Henry subsequently worked as a watchmaker, jeweller, silversmith, and ornamental hairworker in Melbourne before purchasing a brick mansion in Moama, New South Wales, in August 1857, where he opened the Prince of Wales Hotel. He died in Moama on 27 January 1860. Julia later married Walter Moore Miller, a solicitor and mayor of Albury, New South Wales, on 19 November 1862. The family relocated to Melbourne in 1866 and to London in 1870. Robson attended Sacred Heart Convent School at Highgate in north London, studied languages in Brussels, and traveled to Paris for her French examinations.

In London, Robson eloped to marry her first husband, 18-year-old Charles Leveson Gore, at the parish church in Camden Town on 1 November 1875. The couple arrived in New York City on 17 May 1877 aboard the SS Vaderland and subsequently purchased 380 acres of land in Fort Worth, Texas, where they built a house and established a cattle ranch. After selling the property, they moved to New York City with limited funds, and Gore died shortly thereafter. Robson supported her surviving child, Edward Hyde Leveson Gore, by crocheting, embroidery, designing dinner cards, and teaching painting, as two of her three children had died from illness before she began her acting career. Six years into her stage career, she married Augustus Homer Brown, a police surgeon, on 29 May 1889. They remained together until his death on 1 April 1920. Her son Edward later served as her business manager.

Robson's professional stage career began on 17 September 1883 at the Brooklyn Grand Opera House, where she appeared in Hoop of Gold. A billing misspelling rendered her surname as "Robson," which she adopted from that point forward. Over the following decades she built a reputation as a comedian and character actress, aided in part by her association with manager and producer Charles Frohman and the Theatrical Syndicate. In 1911 she established her own touring theatrical company. Her Broadway career ran from 1888 to 1926 and encompassed productions including The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Three Lights, The Two Orphans, and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary. Robson was originally from Melbourne, Australia, and worked extensively across the American stage throughout this period.

Her involvement in film began as early as 1903 or 1904 with uncredited appearances in Edison short film productions. She appeared as herself in the 1915 silent film How Molly Made Good and starred in the 1916 silent film A Night Out, an adaptation of the play she co-wrote, The Three Lights. Also in 1916, she appeared in the Marguerite Clark version of Snow White, and in 1919 she made a guest appearance in the Jack Pickford film In Wrong. In 1927 she moved to Hollywood and embarked on a sustained film career, frequently cast in comedic roles as an older woman. Among her notable sound-era performances were The She-Wolf (1931), in which she played a miserly millionaire businesswoman modeled on real-life miser Hetty Green, and a segment of the anthology film If I Had a Million (1932), in which she portrayed a rest-home resident who receives a one-million-dollar check from a dying business tycoon. She played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1933), Countess Vronsky in Anna Karenina (1935), Aunt Elizabeth in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), and a sharp-tongued Granny in A Star Is Born (1937). She received top billing as late as 1940 in Granny Get Your Gun, and her final film was Joan of Paris (1942).

At the 1934 Academy Awards ceremony, Robson was nominated for Best Actress for Lady for a Day, losing to Katharine Hepburn. She was the first Australian nominated for an acting Oscar and for many years was also the oldest performer to have received such a nomination. Following her death in 1942, her remains were cremated and interred at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York, beside those of her second husband, Augustus Brown. The New York Times described her as the "dowager queen of the American screen and stage."