Rosalind Ivan

Rosalind Ivan (27 November 1880 – 6 April 1959) was an English stage and film character actress born in London, England. Born Rosalind Muriel Pringle, she was the daughter of Stamford and Annie Pringle, who married in 1876 and divorced in 1881. Her mother remarried in 1883, wedding Charles Johnson, and Ivan adopted his surname. By the age of ten she was performing as a concert pianist in England, though financial difficulties within her family brought her piano studies to an end at sixteen.

Ivan's stage career began in England, where she took the role of Retty in Tess in 1900. She subsequently joined Sir Henry Irving's company, and her work in America began with the role of Mme. Thalhouet in Madame Sans Gene in 1902. Her first Broadway appearance came in The Master Builder in 1907, launching a stage career in New York that would span more than three decades. Among her notable Broadway credits were the productions Don't Throw Glass Houses, the musical Knights of Song, Once is Enough, and The Lake. One of her celebrated stage performances was as the vampire in A Fool There Was in 1913. Her final Broadway appearance came in The Corn Is Green in 1940, the drama that also served as the capstone of a Broadway career stretching back thirty-three years.

Ivan appeared in fourteen American films between 1944 and 1954. Her film work included Robert Siodmak's The Suspect in 1944, in which she played the nagging wife of Charles Laughton, and Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street in 1945, in which she portrayed the nagging wife of a bank teller played by Edward G. Robinson. These two similar roles led some in Hollywood to nickname her Ivan the Terrible. She appeared alongside Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in The Verdict in 1946, playing Mrs. Benson, Lorre's comical landlady, and she had a role in 20th Century Fox's Biblical epic The Robe in 1953. Her other film appearances included Pursuit to Algiers in 1945, Johnny Belinda in 1948, and Elephant Walk in 1954.

On 6 April 1959, Ivan was found dead in her hotel room in New York City at the age of 78. Police attributed her death to natural causes.