Rosina Lawrence | |
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Lawrence in 1935
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Born |
Rosina May Lawrence December 30, 1912 Westboro, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
Died | June 23, 1997 New York City, New York, U.S. |
(aged 84)
Cause of death | Cancer |
Occupation | Actress, singer, dancer |
Years active | 1933-1939 |
Spouse(s) | Juvenal P. Marchisio (1939-1973) (his death) (3 children) John C. McCabe (1987-1997) (her death) |
Rosina May Lawrence (December 30, 1912 – June 23, 1997) was a Canadian-born British actress and singer.
She was born to British parents, George Frederick Francis Lawrence and Annie Louise Hagar, who became naturalised United States citizens in 1939. Lawrence's nationality was given as British and it is unclear if she ever became a United States citizen.
Lawrence had a short-lived but memorable career in the 1930s before she married in 1939 and retired from entertainment. She is best known for portraying Mary Roberts in Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West (1937); she also provided the "high" voice when Stan Laurel sang "Trail of the Lonesome Pine". She played "Miss Lawrence", the schoolteacher in the Our Gang comedies from 1936-37, and as Alice Lowell in Charlie Chan's Secret (1936). In 1937, she played "Cecilia Moore" in Pick A Star. Her final performance was in the 1939 Italian comedy film In the Country Fell a Star, in which she plays an American film star who causes great excitement when she appears in a small Italian town.
Lawrence and Juvenal P. Marchisio married in 1939, and she left acting to become a housewife. Marchisio died in 1973, and in 1987, Lawrence remarried, to John McCabe, a biographer of her onetime co-stars Laurel and Hardy.
Rosina Lawrence died of cancer on June 23, 1997 in New York City, aged 84.