Unsmiling character player Lucile Watson was one of Hollywood's most indomitable mothers of the 1930s and 1940s...and you can take that both ways. The archetypal matriarch who enhanced scores of plush, soapy, Victorian-styled drama, her prickly pears could be insufferable indeed and heaven help anyone who gathered up the courage to take them on. A ...
It was all an accident in the first place, my being a comedienne. I came down from Canada to go to dramatic school here in New York. They gave each of the prospective pupils a book and said now sit here and be reading and when you hear a loud knock at the door just follow your impulse, only do something. When the knock came I grabbed my book and sat on it and tried to look demure as I said 'Come in.' immediately they said, 'She is a comedienne,' and they started to drill me in the way a good comedienne should go.
2
Not a single manager in New York had faith in me. They all said: 'Oh, why not go on being yourself? It is foolish to try to play other sorts of roles,' not realizing that I wasn't being myself at all. That person they saw on the stage was not I. It was something which I had created, and one day I found myself almost in the position of Frankenstein. It wasn't I, but it was a strong as I, and in another season I felt that that person which managers and public thought I was would have dominated me completely. There would have been no I - only It.
3
To become a comedienne is the most difficult of all, I think, but it is also difficult to continue to be one after you have learned the technique.
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Fact
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Biography in "Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywood Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties" by Axel Nissen.
$14 Million
