Hermione Gingold (December 9, 1897-May 24, 1987) was an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric persona, an image enhanced by her sharp nose and chin, as well as her deepening voice, a result of vocal nodes which her mother encouraged her not to remove. She appeared on stage, on radio, in films, on television, and in recordings.
Born Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold in London, England, she was the daughter of an high-class Austrian financier and an English housewife. First appearing on stage in 1909, she was originally a coloratura soprano and performed in Shakespearean dramas such as "The Merchant of Venice" and "Troilus and Cressida" and worked with Charles Hawtrey as an understudy. In the 1930s, her quirky, ribald comedic sense became famous through musical revues. She married British publisher Michael Joseph in 1918, with whom she had two sons, Stephen and Leslie. After her divorce in 1926, she married writer and lyricist Eric Maschwitz. They were to divorce in the 1940s.
Gingold was introduced to US servicemen during World War II through the London revue "Sweet and Low." After moving to the United States in 1951, Gingold became a great success there as well. She won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1958 movie Gigi in which she played Madame Alvarez, a retired Paris courtesan who was Gigi's grandmother and mentor. She sang "I Remember it Well" with Maurice Chevalier. She also performed in the Broadway show "Oh Dad, Poor Dad...Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad" in 1963.
Gingold played the mayor's snooty wife Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn in The Music Man (1962), starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones and was part of the original 1973 Broadway cast of A Little Night Music in the role of Mme. Armfeldt, which she reprised on film.
In 1977, with conductor Karl Bohm, she won a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals. She was a regular guest on television talk shows, especially Jack Paar's, where audiences loved her stories. She is quoted as saying, "Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue." She died of heart problems and pneumonia in 1987. Her autobiography "How to Grow Old Disgracefully" was published in 1988.
External links
