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Dame Gladys Constance Cooper DBE (18 December 1888 – 17 November 1971) was an Oscar-nominated English actress.

Early life

Cooper was born in Chiswick, and made her stage début in 1905 in Bluebell in Fairyland.

Career

It was not until 1922, however, that she found major success, in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She appeared in W. Somerset Maugham's Home and Beauty in London in 1919, and Maugham's The Letter in 1927. Her last major success on the stage was in the role of "Mrs. St. Maugham" in Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden, a role she created in London and on Broadway.

Early in her stage career, she was criticized for being stiff. Aldous Huxley dismissed her performance in Home and Beauty: "she is too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world." Alduous Huxley. "A Good Farce." Athenaeum September 26, 1919: 956. Yet Maugham praised her for "turning herself from an indifferent actress to an extremely competent one" through her common sense and industriousness. W. Somerset Maugham. "Gladys Cooper." Plays and Players 1, 3 (December 1953): 4.

She also found success in Hollywood in a variety of character roles and was most frequently cast as a disapproving, aristocratic society woman. She appeared in Rebecca and was nominated three times for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performances: as Bette Davis's pathologically repressive mother in Now, Voyager; as a sceptical nun in The Song of Bernadette; and as "Mrs. Higgins" in My Fair Lady.

Private life

She had three children from her first two marriages. Her elder daughter, Joan Buckmaster (1910 – 2005) married the actor Robert Morley. Her younger daughter, Sally Pearson (aka Sally Cooper) married the actor Robert Hardy.

She lived for many years in Santa Monica, California, as a permanent resident alien with her third husband, British actor Philip Merivale, to whom she was married from 30 April 1937 until 12 March 1946, when he died at the age of 59 from a heart ailment. She herself eventually returned to the United Kingdom for her final years. She appeared with Leo Genn in Somerset Maugham's The Sacred Flame in London in the late 1960s. She died from pneumonia at the age of 82 in England.

An old theatre anecdote recalls that in 1928, she appeared in the play Excelsior in which her sister Doris, a small-part actress who often travelled with Gladys and appeared in some of the same plays, was given a speaking part. On opening night, Doris was reduced to tears backstage after her first appearance, which was greeted by a low hiss from the audience. "Oh no, dear," a friend reassured her. "They're just all whispering to each other, 'She's Doris Cooper. She's Gladys Cooper's sister. Gladys Cooper's sister'."

She was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967.

Television

Among many other appearances, she starred in the 1960s in The Rogues with David Niven, Gig Young, Robert Coote, John Williams and Larry Hagman. For this she won a Golden Globe Award in 1965.

External links

• Performances by Gladys Cooper listed in the Theatre Collection archive, University of Bristol
• Find-A-Grave profile for Gladys Cooper

References

• Gladys Cooper (1979), by Sheridan Morley

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