Zeffie Tilbury

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Zeffie Tilbury on a Cigarette Card (1880s)

Zeffie Agnes Lydia Tilbury (born November 20, 1863 in Paddington , Middlesex , † July 24, 1950 in Los Angeles , California ) was a British actress.

life and career

Zeffie Tilbury was born as the daughter of the London theater actress Lydia Thompson , who was considered a theater legend during her lifetime. Zeffie's father, John Christian Tilbury, worked as a riding master and died in a steeplechase accident just a year after she was born . Like her mother, Tilbury became an actress and appeared on the London theater stages for decades, including in plays by Herbert Beerbohm Tree . Tilbury also played on Broadway between 1904 and 1925 in over a dozen plays.

Today, Tilbury is best known for around 75 film appearances between 1919 and 1942. In numerous Hollywood films of the late silent film era and early sound film era, she embodied old women, both malicious and good-natured. In 1929 she played alongside Greta Garbo in Invisible Fetters . She also played several times at Hal Roach Studios : Tilbury played the old gypsy queen in the Laurel and Hardy film Das Mädel aus dem Böhmerwald (1936) and a grumpy old hypochondriac in the short film Comedy Second Childhood (1936) with the little rascals , who is transformed into a happy old lady within the film - she received many praise for this performance. Zeffie Tilbury had one of her last roles in John Ford's adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel The Fruits of Wrath (1940) as the grandmother of Henry Fonda , who cannot cope with the displacement from her homeland and dies.

In 1942 she retired from the acting business. There are reports that she was blind from the 1930s onwards, but other sources doubt this claim. Zeffie Tilbury was married twice, with her second husband dying in 1915. She died in 1950 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website with a photo of Tilbury from a Tree production
  2. ^ Zeffie Tilbury at the Internet Broadway database
  3. ^ "Second Childhood" at the New York Times
  4. ↑ Biography of Gus Meins ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tbcmo.de
  5. ^ Zeffie Tilbury in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 4, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Tilbury, Zeffie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tilbury, Zeffie Agnes Lydia (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British actress
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Paddington , Middlesex
DATE OF DEATH July 24, 1950
Place of death Los Angeles , California