Hermione Gingold

About Hermione Gingold

Who is it?: Actress, Soundtrack, Writer
Birth Day: December 09, 1897
Birth Place:  Maida Vale, London, England, United Kingdom
Cause of death: Heart disease and pneumonia
Occupation: Actress
Years active: 1909–1984
Spouse(s): Michael Joseph (1918–1926; 2 children) Eric Maschwitz (1926–1945)

Hermione Gingold

Hermione Gingold was born on December 09, 1897 in  Maida Vale, London, England, United Kingdom, is Actress, Soundtrack, Writer. One of stage, screen, radio and TV's most delightful, inimitable eccentrics, Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold was born the daughter of an upscale Austrian financier and English homemaker. She made her stage debut in 1908, thus beginning a long, commanding presence in London playing everything from Jessica in "The Merchant of Venice" to Cassandra in "Troilus and Cressida." Her flair for quirky comedy was discovered in the 30s when she appeared to scene-stealing effect in a host of musical revues. She continued to perform in this venue for many years, sharpening her bawdy, razor-like wit for even better things to come. She entertained throughout WWII and then tested the extent of her popularity by going to the US where she became a celebrated hit, not only with her revues but in such legit Broadway plays as "Oh Dad, Poor Dad...Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad" (1963) and "A Little Night Music" (1973). Never one to be overlooked for long, she was invited to Hollywood and made a decent niche for herself in comedies and musical films. She usually was asked to play her charming and haughty self, most notably as the aging courtesan in Gigi (1958), which won her a Golden Globe award, The Music Man (1962) and as the reminiscing grandmother in a rather pallid film version of her stage hit A Little Night Music (1977). Gingold was a gifted raconteur and became a very popular TV talk-show guest, particularly on Jack Paar's show. She was finishing up the last touches on her autobiography when she passed away of pneumonia and other heart problems in 1987. "How to Grow Old Disgracefully" was published posthumously the next year. A one-of-a-kind entertainer if there ever was one.
Hermione Gingold is a member of Actress

Does Hermione Gingold Dead or Alive?

As per our current Database, Hermione Gingold has been died on 24 May 1987(1987-05-24) (aged 89)\nNew York, New York, U.S..

🎂 Hermione Gingold - Age, Bio, Faces and Birthday

When Hermione Gingold die, Hermione Gingold was 89 years old.

Popular As Hermione Gingold
Occupation Actress
Age 89 years old
Zodiac Sign Capricorn
Born December 09, 1897 ( Maida Vale, London, England, United Kingdom)
Birthday December 09
Town/City  Maida Vale, London, England, United Kingdom
Nationality United Kingdom

🌙 Zodiac

Hermione Gingold’s zodiac sign is Capricorn. According to astrologers, Capricorn is a sign that represents time and responsibility, and its representatives are traditional and often very serious by nature. These individuals possess an inner state of independence that enables significant progress both in their personal and professional lives. They are masters of self-control and have the ability to lead the way, make solid and realistic plans, and manage many people who work for them at any time. They will learn from their mistakes and get to the top based solely on their experience and expertise.

🌙 Chinese Zodiac Signs

Hermione Gingold was born in the Year of the Rooster. Those born under the Chinese Zodiac sign of the Rooster are practical, resourceful, observant, analytical, straightforward, trusting, honest, perfectionists, neat and conservative. Compatible with Ox or Snake.

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Famous Quotes:

It marks, of course, the return of Hermione Gingold, which would be cause enough for cheering. Blatant as ever, deafeningly loud, strutting like a parody of every tragedy queen, male or female, since time began, she was in splendid relishing form, her lips drawn back over fangs and her voice swooping campingly through a whole two octaves of sneer.

Biography/Timeline

1911

Gingold first appeared on stage in a kindergarten staging of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in the role of Wolsey. Her professional début was in 1908 when she had just turned eleven. She played the herald in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of Pinkie and the Fairies by W. Graham Robertson, in a cast including Ellen Terry, Frederick Volpe, Marie Löhr and Viola Tree. She was promoted to the leading role of Pinkie for a provincial tour. Tree cast her as Falstaff's page, Robin, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. She attended Rosina Filippi's stage school in London. In 1911 she was cast in the original production of Where the Rainbow Ends which opened to very good reviews on 21 December 1911. Among her colleagues as child-actors in "Where the Rainbow Ends" were Philip Tonge and Noël Coward.

1912

On 10 December 1912, the day after her fifteenth birthday, Gingold played Cassandra in william Poel's production of Troilus and Cressida at the King's Hall, Covent Garden, with Esmé Percy as Troilus and Edith Evans as Cressida. The following year she appeared in a musical production, The Marriage Market, in a small role in a cast that included Tom Walls, W H Berry, and Gertie Millar. In 1914 she played Jessica in The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic. In 1918 Gingold married the publisher Michael Joseph, with whom she had two sons, the younger of whom, Stephen, became a pioneer of theatre in the round in Britain.

1921

Gingold's adult stage career was slow to take off. She played Liza in If at the Ambassador's in May 1921, and the Old Woman in Ben Travers's farcical comedy The Dippers produced by Sir Charles Hawtrey at the Criterion in August 1922.

1926

In 1926 Gingold divorced from Joseph. Later in the same year she married the Writer and lyricist Eric Maschwitz, whom she divorced in 1945. She underwent a vocal crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s: she had hitherto described herself as "Shakespearian and soprano", but nodules on her vocal cords brought a drastic drop in pitch, about which she commented, "One morning it was Mozart and the next 'Old Man River'". The critic J. C. Trewin described her voice as "powdered glass in deep syrup". During this period she broadcast frequently for the BBC and established herself at the experimental theatre-club the Gate Theatre Studio in London, first as a serious Actress and later in the genre for which she became famous, revue. According to The Times it was in Spread It Abroad (1936) a revue at another theatre, the Saville, with material by Herbert Farjeon that she truly found her milieu.

1930

After a successful career as a child Actress, she later established herself on the stage as an adult, playing in comedy, drama and experimental theatre, and broadcasting on the radio. She found her milieu in revue, 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).

1938

In the ten years from 1938 Gingold concentrated on revue, appearing in nine different productions in the West End. The first four were The Gate Revue (transferred from the Gate to the Ambassador's, 1939), Swinging the Gate (1940), Rise Above It (1941) and Sky High (1942). During this period she and Hermione Baddeley established a stage partnership of what The Times called "briskly sustained mock-rivalry". In June 1943 she opened in a revue at the Ambassadors, Sweet and Low, which was continually revised and refreshed over a run of almost six years, first as Sweeter and Lower and then Sweetest and Lowest. In her sketches she tended, as the Writer of the shows, Alan Melville, recalled, to portray "grotesque and usually unfortunate ladies of dubious age and occasionally, morals; the unhappy female painted by Picasso who found herself lumberered with an extra limb or two … the even less fortunate female who, after years of playing the cello in Palm Court orchestras, ended up bow-legged beyond belief." In a biographical Sketch, Ned Sherrin writes, "Gingold became a special attraction for American Soldiers and 'Thanks, Yanks' was one of her most appropriate numbers. During the astringent, name-dropping 'Sweet' series, she played 1,676 performances, before 800,000 people, negotiating 17,010 costume changes."

1948

Gingold's first new revue after the war was Slings and Arrows at the Comedy in 1948. She was praised, but the material was judged inferior to that of her earlier shows. She appeared in cameo roles in British films, of which Sherrin singles out The Pickwick Papers (1952), in which she played the formidable schoolmistress, Miss Tompkins. Gingold became well known to BBC radio audiences in "Mrs Doom's Diary" in the weekly show Home at Eight; this was a parody of the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary in the manner of the Addams Family with Gingold as Drusilla Doom and Alfred Marks as her sepulchral husband. Gingold and Baddeley co-starred in a Noël Coward double bill in November 1949, presenting Fumed Oak and Fallen Angels. Reviews were poor, and Coward thought the performances crude and overdone, but the production was a box-office success, running until August the following year.

1950

From the early 1950s Gingold lived and made her career mostly in the U.S. 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.

1951

Between 1951 and 1969 Gingold worked mostly in the US. Her first engagement there was at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in It's About Time, a revue that incorporated some of her London material. In December 1953, she opened in John Murray Anderson's Almanac which made her an instant Broadway success and for which she won the Donaldson Award in 1954. She also became a regular guest on talk shows. In 1951 she cited as her hobbies; 'Interior decoration' and 'collecting china'.

1956

Gingold continued to make films. In 1956 she played a London "sporting lady" in Around the World in 80 Days, and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1958 film Gigi playing Madame Alvarez, Gigi's loving grandmother. In the film, she sang "I Remember it Well" with Maurice Chevalier. She said, "It was my first American film and I was very nervous." But Chevalier put her at ease. "I had to sing and I hadn't got a great voice, but with him I felt the greatest prima donna in the world." Gingold followed this with another hit film Bell, Book and Candle, also 1958, in which her role was Mrs Bianca De Pass. She played the mayor's haughty wife Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn in The Music Man (1962) starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones.

1963

In October 1963, Gingold opened in Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, playing a monstrously possessive mother driving her son crazy. She played the role in the London production in 1965. Reviewing the latter, and noting that the first night had been greeted with cheering at the end, the critic Philip Hope-Wallace wrote:

1973

Gingold was a member of the original 1973 Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music in the role of the elderly Mme. Armfeldt, a former courtesan. Clive Barnes wrote of her performance, "Hermione Gingold is immeasurably grande dame as the almost Proustian hostess (I haven't loved her so much since she sang about the Borgia orgies 30 years ago)." When the production transferred to London in 1975 Gingold reprised the role, and later played it in the film version of the musical (1977).

1975

At the age of 77, Gingold made her operatic début, joining the San Francisco Opera to play the spoken role of the Duchess of Crackenthorp in Donizetti's La fille du régiment in 1975. In 1977 she took over the narrator's role in Side by Side by Sondheim on Broadway. After the New York run, the show toured the US. In Kansas City, the 79-year-old Gingold suffered an accident that broke her knee and dislocated her arm; this brought her performing career to an end (although she appeared in a 1980s Goya commercial for their drink "Coca Goya" while lounging on a chaise lounge shaking the two cans like maracas.)

1987

Gingold died from heart problems and pneumonia at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan on 24 May 1987, aged 89.

1988

Gingold's autobiography, How to Grow Old Disgracefully, was published posthumously in 1988. It had previously been published in installments: The World Is Square (1946), My Own Unaided Work (1952) and Sirens Should Be Seen and Not Heard (1963). She also wrote a play called Abracadabra and contributed original material to the many revues in which she performed.

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