Edna May Oliver

Edna May Oliver (born Edna May Nutter, November 9, 1883 – November 9, 1942) was an American stage and film actress. During the 1930s, she was one of the better-known character actresses in American films, often playing tart-tongued spinsters.

Early life

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Oliver quit school at age 14 to pursue a stage career. She achieved her first success in 1917 on Broadway in Jerome Kern's musical comedy Oh, Boy!, playing the hero's comically dour Aunt Penelope.

Career

In 1925, Oliver appeared on Broadway in The Cradle Snatchers, costarring Mary Boland, Gene Raymond, and Humphrey Bogart. Oliver's most notable stage appearance was as Parthy, wife of Cap'n Andy Hawks, in the original 1927 stage production of the musical Show Boat. She repeated the role in the 1932 Broadway revival, but turned down the chance to play Parthy in the 1936 film version to play the Nurse in that year's film version of Romeo and Juliet.

Her film debut was in 1923 in Wife in Name Only. She continued to appear in films until Lydia in 1941. She first gained major notice in films for her appearances in several comedies starring the team of Wheeler & Woolsey, including Half Shot at Sunrise, her first film under her RKO Radio Pictures contract in 1930. Usually in featured parts, she starred in ten films, including the women's stories Fanny Foley Herself and Ladies of the Jury. She played wealthy, domineering Aunt March in the 1933 version of Little Women.

Oliver's most popular star vehicles were mystery-comedies, starring as spinster sleuth Hildegarde Withers from the popular Stuart Palmer novels. The series ended prematurely when she left RKO to sign with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1935; the studio attempted to continue the series with Helen Broderick and then ZaSu Pitts as Withers.

While at MGM, David O. Selznick cast Oliver in two film versions of novels by Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1935), starring Ronald Colman, as the prim, acidic Miss Pross; and David Copperfield (also 1935), as the title character's eccentric aunt, Betsy Trotwood.

She appeared in the Shirley Temple film Little Miss Broadway (1938) as the landlord of a hotel for vaudevillians who wants to shut it down.

She was also seen in two 1939 movie musicals: with Tyrone Power in the Sonja Henie skating film Second Fiddle, and in a supporting role as the agent of the title characters in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. That year she was nominated for a Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance in Drums Along the Mohawk as an early American settler who gives shelter to Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert when their home is burned by Seneca Indians. A 1940 comic performance as Laurence Olivier's Mr. Darcy's domineering aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice and a 1941 role as Merle Oberon's grandmother in Lydia concluded her film career.

She was also cast in noncomedic films such as Cimarron (1931), Ann Vickers (1933), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), David Copperfield (1935), and Romeo and Juliet (1936).

Death

Oliver died on her 59th birthday in 1942 following a short intestinal ailment, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Awards and honors

Oliver received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Drums Along the Mohawk (1939).

Stage

(This list is limited to New York/Broadway theatrical productions.)

Filmography

Bibliography

• Monush, Barry (2003). Screen World Presents the Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors: From the silent era to 1965. Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 978-1-55783-551-2.
• Palmer, Stuart (2013). Hildegarde Withers in The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders. Wildside Press LLC. ISBN 978-1-4344-4637-4.