Margaret Dumont

Margaret Dumont
Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera (1935)
Born	Daisy Juliette Baker (1882-10-20)October 20, 1882 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Died	March 6, 1965(1965-03-06) (aged 82) Hollywood, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1902-1910, 1917-1965
Spouse(s)	John Moller, Jr. (m.1910-1918; his death)

Margaret Dumont (October 20, 1882 – March 6, 1965) was an American stage and film actress. She is best remembered as the comic foil to the Marx Brothers in seven of their films. Groucho Marx called her "practically the fifth Marx brother."

She was born Daisy Juliette Baker in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of William and Harriet Anna (née Harvey) Baker. Dumont trained as an operatic singer and actress in her teens, and began performing on stage in both the U.S. and in Europe, at first under the name Daisy Dumont and later as Margaret (or Marguerite) Dumont. Her theatrical debut was in Beauty and the Beast at the Chestnut Theater in Philadelphia, and in August 1902, two months before her 20th birthday, she appeared as a singer/comedian in a vaudeville act in Atlantic City. The dark-haired soubrette, described by a theater reviewer as a "statuesque beauty", attracted notice later that decade for her vocal and comedic talents in The Girl Behind the Counter (1908), The Belle of Brittany (1909), and The Summer Widower (1910).

In 1910, she married millionaire sugar heir and industrialist John Moller Jr., and retired from stage work, although she had a small uncredited role as an aristocrat in a 1917 film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. The marriage was childless. After her husband's sudden death during the 1918 influenza pandemic, she returned reluctantly to the Broadway stage, and soon gained a strong reputation in musical comedy productions. She never remarried.

Her Broadway career included roles in the musical comedies and plays The Fan (1921), Go Easy, Mabel (1922), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923/24), and The Fourflusher (1925), and she had an uncredited role in the 1923 film Enemies of Women.

Dumont then came to the attention of writer George S. Kaufman, who hired her to play the dowager Mrs. Potter alongside the four Marx Brothers in their Broadway production of The Cocoanuts in 1925. In October 1928, their next Broadway show, Animal Crackers, opened, and Dumont was again cast as the Marx Brothers' foil and straight woman, Mrs. Rittenhouse, the wealthy society dowager. In 1929, they filmed the screen version of The Cocoanuts.