Hermione Gingold

Hermione Gingold
Gingold in 1973, by Allan Warren
Born	(1897-12-09)9 December 1897 London, England, UK
Died	24 May 1987(1987-05-24) (aged 89) New York, New York, U.S.
Cause of death	Heart disease and pneumonia
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1909–1977
Spouse(s)	Michael Joseph (1918–1926; 2 children) Eric Maschwitz (1926–1945)

Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold (9 December 1897 – 24 May 1987) was an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric persona. Her signature drawling, deep voice was a result of nodes on her vocal chords in the 1920s and early 1930s.

After a successful career as a child actress, she later established herself on the stage as an adult, playing in comedy, drama and experiment theatre, and broadcasting on the radio. She found her milieu in revue, in which she played from the 1930s to the 1950s, co-starring several times with Hermione Baddeley. Later she played formidable elderly characters in such films and stage musicals as Gigi (1958), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), The Music Man (1962) and A Little Night Music (1973).

From the early 1950s Gingold lived and made her career mostly in the US. Her American stage work ranged from John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1953) to Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1963), the latter of which she also played in London. She became well known as a guest on television talk shows. She made further appearances in revue and toured in plays and musicals until an accident ended her performing career in 1977.

Gingold was born in Carlton Hill, Maida Vale, London, the elder daughter of a prosperous Vienna-born Jewish James Gingold and his wife, Kate (née Walter). Her paternal grandparents were the Ottoman-born British subject, Moritz "Maurice" Gingold, a London stockbroker, and his Austrian-born wife, Hermine, after whom Hermione was named (Gingold mentions in her autobiography that her mother might have got Hermione from the Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale, which she was reading shortly before her birth). On her father's side, she was descended from the celebrated Solomon Sulzer, a famous synagogue cantor and Jewish liturgical composer in Vienna. Her mother was from a "well-to-do Jewish family". James felt that religion was something children needed to decide on for themselves, and Gingold grew up with no particular religious beliefs.