The Guardian (07/Nov/1994) - Obituary: Mildred Natwick
(c) The Guardian (07/Nov/1994)
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, New York City, New York, Noël Coward, The Trouble with Harry (1955)
The lively loner - Obituary: Mildred Natwick
Mildred Natwick, who has died aged 89, could have echoed the words of Widow Quin in The Playboy Of The Western World, the role she played on Broadway in 1946: "You'll swear the Lord God formed me to be living lone." For if the stage or screen required someone to portray an elderly widow, eccentric maiden aunt or fussy duenna, she fitted the bill perfectly.
Natwick, who never married, came from a wealthy Baltimore family, and studied at Bryn Mawr, the posh girls college in Philadelphia, where she was a senior at the time Katharine Hepburn was a junior. From the start of her professional career in New York, aged 24, Natwick usually played women older than herself. Her favourite stage roles included Proserpine Garnett in Shaw's Candida; Madame Arcati, the dotty medium in Coward's Blythe Spirit; Volumnia in Coriolanus, and the wise-cracking widowed mother-in-law of Robert Redford (his last stage appearance) in Neil Simon's Barefoot In The Park, a part she also played in London, and in the 1967 movie version, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
Natwick made her film debut as an Irish prostitute in John Ford's The Long Voyage Home in 1942. Ford cast her again as sturdy self-reliant women in Three Godfathers, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (both 1949) and The Quiet Man (1952). But it was Alfred Hitchcock who supplied her with a plum part in the black comedy, The Trouble With Harry (1955). Natwick is humorously quirky as Miss Gravely, the old maid who discovers the corpse of the title, and touching in her love for ageing sea captain Edmund Gwenn. Seeing Gwenn struggling to pull "Harry" along over rough ground, she comments heartlessly: "What seems to be the trouble, Captain?"
She is also a delight as convent-girl Lucille Bremer's grotesquely over-refined Aunt Armarilla in Vincente Minnelli's decorative fantasy, Yolanda And The Thief (1945). "You'll love the blue room," she enthuses to her niece. "But, Madame, you are quartered there," says one of her servants. "You would have loved the blue room," she coos regretfully.
But perhaps her most famous lines in the movies were her tongue-twisting instructions to Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1956). "The chalice from the palace has the pellets with the poison; the vessel with the pestle, not the flagon with the dragon, has the brew that is true."
Mildred Natwick celebrated her 83rd birthday during the shooting of Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons (1988), in which she gave a finely modulated performance as Valmont's aunt, Madame de Rosemonde, at whose country estate much of the sexual intriguing takes place.
Mildred Natwick, born June 19, 1905; died October 25, 1994.
