Nora Cecil

Nora Cecil (September 20, 1878 – May 1, 1951) was a British-American character actress whose 30-year career spanned both the silent and sound film eras. Cecil's career began on the stage, where she appeared in a single Broadway production, The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast, which ran for more than 240 performances at the Broadway Theatre in 1901-02. (A 1930 newspaper article says that Cecil "made her debut, three decades ago, on the London stage.") Cecil appeared in well over 100 feature films and film shorts. In 1915, she moved from the stage into films, her first appearance being in a starring role in The Arrival of Perpetua, directed by Émile Chautard. She often played "thin-lipped, stern-visaged dowagers and forbidding mothers-in-law" and "welfare workers, landladies, schoolmistresses and maiden aunts". One of the most significant roles was in the W.C. Fields vehicle, The Old Fashioned Way in 1934. Some of the other notable films in which Cecil appeared include: Ernst Lubitsch's historical romance, The Merry Widow, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald; the 1939 version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, starring Mickey Rooney; the John Ford classic, Stagecoach, with John Wayne. Her final acting performance was in a featured role in Mourning Becomes Electra in 1947, starring Rosalind Russell.