Sara Haden

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Sara Haden (born November 17, 1898 in Galveston , Texas , † September 15, 1981 in Woodland Hills , Los Angeles ; actually Katherine Haden ) was an American theater and film actress .

Life

Childhood and youth

Haden's mother Charlotte Walker (1902)

Sara Haden was the second daughter of John Brannum Haden (1871-1931), a doctor, and the theater and film actress Charlotte Walker (1876-1958) in Galveston, Texas. After the parents' divorce in 1908, Sara Haden accompanied her mother on theater tours with her one year older sister Beatrice, which is why Haden changed schools several times after attending the Dominican Boarding School in Galveston. She attended schools in Williamstown , Massachusetts , Charleston , South Carolina , New Jersey, and St. Mary's Girls' School in Garden City on Long Island .

First stage appearances

When her mother was guest at the Belasco Theater in Washington, DC for a performance of Zaza and a young actress was absent due to illness, Haden stepped in for her. Haden's performance was well received, whereupon she tried successfully for a supporting role in a production of Ibsen's Nora or A Doll's House while she was still in Washington . After graduating from St. Mary's, Haden traveled to Europe. In 1918 she returned to the United States to appear with her mother in the play Nancy Lee . Her mother thought she wasn't tough enough for an acting career, but Haden didn't let that stop her from concentrating entirely on acting. With Walter Hampden's Shakespearean Repertory Company, she first appeared on Broadway in Macbeth in 1921 . She was then seen on the theater stage in London , where she appeared with Lucille La Verne in Lula Vollmer's Sun-Up . Back in New York in 1925 she acted in Frederick Lonsdale's rogue comedy The Last of Mrs. Cheyney .

Film career

From late 1927 to early 1928, Sara Haden played Etta Dawson in Trigger , another play by Lula Vollmer about a boyish miracle healer, directed by George Cukor . In 1933, Cukor prepared a screen adaptation of the play in Hollywood. Vollmer was also involved in the script as a writer and suggested that Haden take her stage role in the film. Haden made her first screen appearance in 1934 in the film published by RKO Pictures under the title Spitfire , in which Katharine Hepburn played the leading role and in which John Cromwell was ultimately the director.

This was followed by other appearances in films by RKO, but it was her role as a prudish secretary in the musical comedy Liebesreigen (1934) by the Fox Film Corporation that set Haden on a certain type of role. From then on she was mostly cast as an old maid, strict teacher or busy office worker and appeared older and more inconspicuous than she actually was. A 1946 Herald Tribune article described her as an "actress with a sarcastic tongue and a face that could freeze suddenly" ("the actress with the sarcastic tongue and the visage that can be turned into an ice pack at a moment's notice" " ). With “I'm just an old chunk of ice. Nobody loves me. ”(“ I'm just an old frozenface. Nobody loves me. ”) She is said to have summarized her screen image herself. Because of her role as a grouchy school board officer, child star Shirley Temple in Shirley Ahoy! (1936) wants to be put in an orphanage, Haden said he was avoided by children who had seen the film. Even her own nephew is said to have met her with “baleful eyes”.

In 1937 Sara Haden received a contract with MGM , where, as before, she was used in numerous supporting roles. For example in the crime film Under Cover of Night (1937), in which she mimed a physicist whose husband pretends to be his own and finally kills her when she prepares to leave him. That same year she first appeared in the role of unmarried Aunt Milly in A Family Affair , the first part of MGM's Andy Hardy series. With the exception of two films, she held this role in all parts of the long-lived series in which Mickey Rooney played the title role of Andy Hardy. While she mostly only acted in the background as Aunt Milly, in the sixth part The Hardys Ride High (1939) she was a little more in the center of the action than Aunt Milly was allowed to adore and she was allowed to dress up and show more emotions. Haden has also appeared in other film comedies over the years. In Remember? (1939) she was reoccupied as secretary alongside Robert Taylor and Greer Garson . Directed by Ernst Lubitsch , she also worked as a saleswoman for Flora in the romantic comedy Rendezvous after the store closes (1940). She had her last screen appearance in 1958 in a revival of the Andy Hardy series under the title Andy Hardy Comes Home . From the beginning of the 1950s she occasionally appeared on television. She had guest appearances in series such as Perry Mason (1959) and Bonanza (1962). In 1965 she finally retired from show business.

Private life

With the actor Richard Abbott (actually Richard Vandenberg, 1899-1986), who later switched to the real estate business, Haden was married from 1921 until the divorce in 1948. There were no children from the marriage. Sara Haden died in 1981 of an unspecified illness at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills. She was buried in the Old City Cemetery in her hometown of Galveston, which is also where her mother's grave is located.

Filmography (selection)

literature

  • Sara Haden . In: Howard Dietz, Howard Strickling: Who's Who at Metro Goldwyn Mayer . Loew's, 1942, p. 56.
  • Sara Haden . In: James Robert Parish, Ronald L. Bowers: The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era . Allan, 1974, pp. 305-306.

Web links

Commons : Sara Haden  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See ancestry.com , immortalephemera.com , California Death Records ( Memento of the original from January 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Other sources such as the Internet Movie Database and Internet Broadway Database give 1899 as the year of birth. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / vitals.rootsweb.ancestry.com
  2. ↑ cf. wikitree.com
  3. ^ Divorced to Wed Hackett . In: The New York Times , August 1, 1908 ( see ancestry.com ).
  4. ↑ a b c Cliff Aliperti: Sara Haden - Charlotte Walker's Daughter and Andy Hardy's Aunt Milly . immortalephemera.com, December 17, 2012.
  5. ^ Arthur Ingram: A History of Fire-Fighting and Equipment . Chartwell, 1978, p. 211.
  6. ↑ Sara Haden . In: James Robert Parish, Ronald L. Bowers: The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era . Allan, 1974, p. 305.
  7. ^ A b Sara Haden, Actress Played Crabby Roles in Long Film Career . In: The New York Times , September 22, 1981.
  8. ↑ Charlotte Walker in the Find a Grave database
personal data
SURNAME Haden, Sara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haden, Katherine (real name); Haden, Sarah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theater and film actress
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Galveston , Texas
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 1981
Place of death Woodland Hills , Los Angeles