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Josephine Hull

Josephine Hull
Josephine Hull.jpg
Born Mary Josephine Sherwood
(1877-01-03)January 3, 1877
Newtonville, Massachusetts, US
Died March 12, 1957(1957-03-12) (aged 80)
The Bronx, New York, US
Alma mater Radcliffe College
Occupation Actress
Years active 1905–1955
Spouse(s) Shelly Hull (1910–1919; his death)

Marie Josephine Hull (née Sherwood; January 3, 1877 – March 12, 1957) was an American stage and film actress who also was a director of plays. She had a successful 50-year career on stage while taking some of her better known roles to film. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the movie Harvey (1950), a role she originally played on the Broadway stage.

Hull was born January 3, 1877, in Newtonville, Massachusetts, one of four children born to William H. Sherwood and Mary Elizabeth ("Minnie") Tewkesbury, but would later shave years off her true age. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music and Radcliffe College, both in the Boston area.

Hull made her stage debut in stock in 1905, and after some years as a chorus girl and touring stock player, she married actor Shelley Hull (the elder brother of actor Henry Hull) in 1910. After her husband's death as a young man, the actress retired until 1923, when she returned to acting using her married name, Josephine Hull. The couple had no children.

She had her first major stage success in George Kelly's Pulitzer-winning Craig's Wife in 1926. Kelly wrote a role especially for her in his next play, Daisy Mayme, which also was staged in 1926. She continued working in New York theater throughout the 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hull appeared in three Broadway hits, as a batty matriarch in You Can't Take It with You (1936), as a homicidal old lady in Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), and in Harvey (1944). The plays all had long runs, and took up ten years of Hull's career. Her last Broadway play, The Solid Gold Cadillac (1954–55), was later made into a film with the much younger Judy Holliday.


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