Katharine Alexander(1898-1977)
- Actress
- Soundtrack
Katherine (also called Katharine) Alexander, an excellent character
actress, had been born in 1897 to a mother who was part Cherokee and to
a father who farmed land on Indian territory. And yet she was never
given the part of a native American in the course of her
thirty-five-year acting career. Often a society lady, at times a
suffering wife or a dignified mother, she was nearly always
all-American. At ease in the register of drama and tragedy as well as
in that of comedy, Katherine Alexander was a talented and versatile
performer who alternated theater and cinema throughout a highly
respectable career. An artist she was bound to be but rather a concert
one than a thespian. Her mother, a frustrated musician herself, had
indeed seen to it that she receive a formal musical education and young
Katherine proved gifted at the violin. And she was indeed giving a
violin recital when producer Samuel Goldwyn, who needed an actress who
could play the violin for a play he was producing, noticed the young
lady and hired her for the role. Miss Alexander, who had not yet turned
twenty, realized that she much preferred acting to music playing and
that was the beginning of a fruitful career on stage first and
alternately on the boards and on the big screen as soon as the cinema
started talking. A leading lady on Broadway (where she delivered the
lines of such distinguished playwrights as
Arthur Schnitzler,
Robert E. Sherwood or
Philip Barry),she was soon seen as
an indispensable supporting actress in Hollywood movies. She was always
reliable and competent and did not pale by the side of great stars like
Greta Garbo (the wife of Garbo's lover in
Le Voile des illusions (1934)), Bette
Davis (the wife of a lawyer in love with Davis in
Une certaine femme (1937) ;
Miss Trask in Une femme cherche son destin (1942)),
Cary Grant (Mrs. Morton in
L'autre (1939)) or
John Barrymore (Miss Billow in
The Great Man Votes (1939).
Katherine Alexander's shining hour came in 1949, two years before she
retired, when she embodied Linda Loman, the no-nonsense wife of
pathetic salesman Paul Muni in the
London production of
Arthur Miller's "Death of a
Salesman". After such a triumph, she decided to give up her career and
for thirty years on, she enjoyed a happy second life until her death in
early 1981.
