Career

Watson began her career on the stage debuting on Broadway in the play Hearts Aflame in 1902. Her next play was The Girl With Green Eyes, the first of several Clyde Fitch

Clyde Fitch

Clyde Fitch was an American dramatist.-Biography:Born William Clyde Fitch at Elmira, New York, he wrote over 60 plays, 36 of them original, which varied from social comedies and farces to melodrama and historical dramas.As the only child to live to adulthood, his father, Captain William G...

 stories. At the end of 1903, Lucile appeared in Fitch's "Glad of It". This play featured several young performers including Lucile who would move on to major Broadway or motion picture prominence; Robert Warwick, John Barrymore

John Barrymore

John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...

, Thomas Meighan

Thomas Meighan

Thomas Meighan was an American actor of silent films and early talkies. He played several leading man roles opposite popular actresses of the day including Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. At one point he commanded $10,000 a week....

 and Grant Mitchell

Grant Mitchell (actor)

Grant Mitchell was an American stage actor on Broadway and character actor in many Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s...

 to say the least. For the rest of the decade she appeared in several more Fitch stories into the 1910s as Fitch would die in 1909. Sometime in the 1910s she was briefly married to silent film star Rockliffe Fellowes

Rockliffe Fellowes

Rockliffe Fellowes was a Canadian actor who was born 17 March 1883 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and died 28 January 1950 in Los Angeles, California, USA, aged 66. Years active: 1907 to 1934...

. Watson in her youth had an ordinate beauty but with a stern expression on her face. Photos taken during her Broadway years show a look that movie audiences would become accustomed to. It is not known if she cultivated this look for films or that she wanted to ward off a lot of male attention to her subtle beauty. Watson's first film role was in the 1916 silent film

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 The Girl with Green Eyes, a film version of the Clyde Fitch play she had performed in on Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 in 1902. She did not appear in another movie until 1930, when she had an uncredited role in The Royal Family of Broadway

The Royal Family of Broadway

The Royal Family of Broadway is a comedy film, directed by George Cukor and Cyril Gardner, and released by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay was adapted by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Gertrude Purcell from the play The Royal Family by Edna Ferber and George S...

. Her marriage to Fellows produced no children.

Watson was primarily a stage actress, starring in such plays as Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines

Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines

Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines is an opera in three acts by Jack Beeson written in 1975 to a libretto by Sheldon Harnick after the play by Clyde Fitch....

, Heartbreak House

Heartbreak House

Heartbreak House is a play written by George Bernard Shaw, first published in 1919 and first played at the Garrick Theatre in 1920. According to A. C. Ward, the work argues that "cultured, leisured Europe" was drifting toward destruction, and that "Those in a position to guide Europe to safety...

, Ghosts

Ghosts (play)

Ghosts is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1881 and first staged in 1882.Like many of Ibsen's better-known plays, Ghosts is a scathing commentary on 19th century morality....

, The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at St. James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae in order to escape burdensome social obligations...

and Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England...

. Her second husband was playwright Louis E. Shipman whom she married in 1928. She was widowed in 1933.

Lucile reached the height of her adult acting career in playwright Lillian Hellman's anti-fascist dramatic stage play Watch on the Rhine on Broadway in 1941, starring Paul Lukas

Paul Lukas

Paul Lukas was an Austrian-Hungarian-born actor.-Biography:Born Pál Lukács in Budapest, he arrived in Hollywood in 1927 after a successful stage and film career in Hungary, Germany and Austria where he worked with Max Reinhardt. He made his stage debut in Budapest in 1916 and his film debut in 1917...

. Two years later in Hollywood, she and Lukas reprised their roles in the film adaptation. In perhaps her best known film role, Lucile Watson's performance as 'Mrs. Fanny Farrelly' was also acknowledged with a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress

Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress

Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry. Since its inception, however, the...

, but she lost to Greek-born actress Katina Paxinou

Katina Paxinou

Katina Paxinou was a Greek film and theatre actress.-Early life:Born Aikaterini Konstantopoulou in Piraeus, Greece, she trained as an opera singer, and appeared in the operatic version of Maeterlinck's "Sister Beatrice," with a score by Dimitri Mitropoulos, but changed career and joined the Greek...

 for her performance as Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is assigned to blow up a...

.

Other notable movies included The Garden of Allah (1936), The Women

The Women (1939 film)

The Women is a 1939 American comedy-drama film directed by George Cukor. The film is based on Clare Boothe Luce's play of the same name, and was adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, who had to make the film acceptable for the Production Code in order for it to be released.The film...

(1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Great Lie

The Great Lie

The Great Lie is a 1941 American drama film directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Bette Davis, George Brent, and Mary Astor. The screenplay by Lenore J...

(1941), The Thin Man Goes Home

The Thin Man Goes Home

The Thin Man Goes Home is a 1945 motion picture directed by Richard Thorpe. It is the fifth of the six Thin Man films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Dashiell Hammett's dapper private detective Nick Charles and his wife Nora.-Plot:...

(1944), The Razor's Edge

The Razor's Edge (1946 film)

The Razor's Edge is the first film version of W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel. It was released in 1946 and stars Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, John Payne, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb, Herbert Marshall, supporting cast Lucile Watson, Frank Latimore and Elsa Lanchester. Marshall plays Somerset Maugham....

(1946), Tomorrow Is Forever

Tomorrow Is Forever

Tomorrow Is Forever is a 1946 black-and-white film distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, directed by Irving Pichel, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles and George Brent. The music score is by Max Steiner...

(1946), Song of the South

Song of the South

Song of the South is a 1946 American musical film produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures. The film is based on the Uncle Remus cycle of stories by Joel Chandler Harris. The live actors provide a sentimental frame story, in which Uncle Remus relates the folk tales of the...

(1946), That Wonderful Urge

That Wonderful Urge

That Wonderful Urge is a 1948 20th Century Fox screwball comedy film, a remake of Love is News , directed by Robert Sinclair starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney.- Plot :...

 (1948) and Little Women (1949), and her last feature film role as 'Aunt Eula Beaurevel' in My Forbidden Past

My Forbidden Past

My Forbidden Past is a 1951 film directed by Robert Stevenson. It stars Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner.. Adapted from Polan Banks novel Carriage Entrance by Leopold Atlas.-Cast:*Robert Mitchum as Dr...

(1951).

Death

Lucile Watson died on June 25, 1962, after suffering a heart attack at age 83. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Hastings-on-Hudson is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located in the southwest part of the town of Greenburgh. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 7,849. It lies on U.S. Route 9, "Broadway" in Hastings...

.

Selected filmography

• What Every Woman Knows
  What Every Woman Knows (film)
  What Every Woman Knows is a American comedy film directed by Gregory La Cava and starring Helen Hayes, Brian Aherne, and Madge Evans. The film was produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and is based on the play What Every Woman Knows by J. M. Barrie. It was filmed by Paramount back in...
  
  (1934)
• Made for Each Other
  Made for Each Other
  Made for Each Other may refer to:*Made for Each Other , starring Carole Lombard and James Stewart*Made for Each Other , featuring Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna...
  
  (1939)

Sources

• Lucile Watson biography by Film historian T. R. Bourgeois

External links

• Lucile Watson portraits Broadway 1910s or 20s NYP Library
• http://www.condenaststore.com/Photographs/Lucile-Watson/invt/103363Lucile Watson posing for Vanity Fair
  Vanity Fair (magazine)
  Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
  
  August 1921] portrait by Nickolas Muray
  Nickolas Muray
  Nickolas Muray was a Hungarian-born American photographer and Olympic fencer.-Biography:...