Gladys Cooper
Dame Gladys Constance Cooper DBE (
18 December 1888–
17 November 1971) was an
Oscar-nominated
English actress.
Cooper was born in
Chiswick, West
London, and made her stage début in 1905 in
Bluebell in Fairyland.
It was not until 1922, however, that she found major success, in
Arthur Wing Pinero's
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She appeared in
W. Somerset Maugham's
Home and Beauty in London in 1919, and Maugham's
The Letter in 1927. Her last major success on the stage was in the role of "Mrs. St. Maugham" in
Enid Bagnold's
The Chalk Garden, a role she created in London and on
Broadway. Early in her stage career, she was criticized for being stiff.
Aldous Huxley dismissed her performance in
Home and Beauty: "she is too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were
Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world."
[Alduous Huxley. "A Good Farce." Athenaeum September 26, 1919: 956.] Yet Maugham praised her for "turning herself from an indifferent actress to an extremely competent one" through her common sense and industriousness.
[ W. Somerset Maugham. "Gladys Cooper." Plays and Players 1, 3 (December 1953): 4].
She also found success in
Hollywood in a variety of character roles and was most frequently cast as a disapproving, aristocratic society woman. She appeared in
Rebecca and was nominated three times for an
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performances as
Bette Davis's pathologically repressive mother in
Now, Voyager; as a sceptical nun in
The Song of Bernadette; and as "Mrs. Higgins" in
My Fair Lady.
She had three children from her first two marriages. Her elder daughter
Joan Buckmaster (1910–2005) married the actor
Robert Morley. Her younger daughter,
Sally Pearson (aka
Sally Cooper) married the actor
Robert Hardy.
She lived for many years in
Santa Monica, California, essentially as a permanent resident alien with her third husband, British actor
Philip Merivale, to whom she was married from
30 April 1937 until
12 March 1946, when he died at the age of 59 from a heart ailment. She herself eventually returned to the
United Kingdom for her final years. She appeared with
Leo Genn in
Somerset Maugham's
The Sacred Flame in London in the late 1960s. She died from pneumonia at the age of 82 in England.
An old theatre anecdote recalls that in 1928, she appeared in the play
Excelsior in which her sister Doris, a small-part actress who often travelled with Gladys and appeared in some of the same plays, was given a speaking part. On opening night, Doris was reduced to tears backstage after her first appearance, which was greeted by a low hiss from the audience. "Oh no, dear," a friend reassured her. "They're just all whispering to each other, 'She's Doris Cooper. She's Gladys Cooper's sister. Gladys Cooper's sister'."
She was created a
Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967.
Among many other appearances, she starred in the 1960s in
The Rogues with
David Niven,
Gig Young,
Robert Coote,
John Williams,
Larry Hagman. For this she won a
Golden Globe Award in 1965.and many other TV appearances
*
Classic Movies (1939 - 1969): Gladys Cooper*
Performances by Gladys Cooper listed in the Theatre Collection archive, University of Bristol*
Find-A-Grave profile for Gladys CooperGladys Cooper (1979), by
Sheridan Morley
