1879-1967
Actress Jane Darwell was born Patti Mary Woodard into a very well off family in Palmyra, Missouri on this day. She had dreams of becoming an opera performer from a young age (well, as a very small child, she wanted badly to be a circus performer--what kid doesn't go through a phase like this?). But, her railroad president father strongly disapproved; so she subsequently stated her plan was to enter and convent and become a nun instead. Obviously this did not happen, as we have her very LONG list of acting credits--some of which are famous--to prove otherwise.😉 As a younger woman, she did study music and drama, but did not make her acting debut until she was in her 30's. She started in the theater, and in 1913, graduated to film. Her film debut came in the Francis Ford film The Capture of Aguinaldo made for Bison. She appeared in eight films in that year, all of them shorts. Her first film of 1914 is a rather famously lost silent: Brewster's Millions, co-directed by Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille, she assays the aptly named role of "Mrs. Dan DeMille" (inside joke, apparently). She also appeared in three more Apfel/DeMille projects (The Master Mind, The Only Son, & The Man On The Box), before appearing in films directed by each individually (Apfel: Ready Money, DeMille: Rose of the Rancho)--all in 1914. She next had an uncredited role in one of Lois Weber's groundbreaking films: Hypocrites (1915) going on to next appear in the Fred Thomson directed The Goose Girl (1915) starring Marguerite Clark. She made two more film appearances in 1915, the first in the Apfel adventure film The Rug Maker's Daughter, and the second in the political melodrama The Reform Candidate, before taking a multi-year break from film acting. In fact, she had only one more appearance in the silent era, in an uncredited role in the William Seiter melodrama Little Church Around the Corner in 1923. Her come back in the age of sound in 1930 was a big one! She appeared with Jackie Coogan (you know "Uncle Fester"), and a whole host of others, in Paramount's Tom Sawyer (she also appeared with him the following year in Huckleberry Finn). After this point, she was never far from a camera. By far the most famous film of the 1930's in which she acted was Gone With The Wind. For her appearance in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (a role she reportedly got at the insistence of the lead actor: Henry Fonda). Darwell made her television debut in 1951 in the A Slight Touch of Youth episode of the short-lived 'Personal Appearance Theater.' This kicked off a long and varied second career on the small screen. Her very last role is also a famous one: The Bird Woman in Mary Poppins in 1964; she was 84 years of age at the time of the film's release. She then retired due to poor health, other wise I am quite sure that she would have been happy to keep working. She passed away on the 13th of August in 1967 at the age of 87 in Los Angeles. She was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale under both her birth name and her stage name. And again, since this is spooktober, it is worth mentioning that she had a tiny extra part in the pre-code horror Murders in the Zoo in 1933 (the film is a real curiosity, not least because it is probably only one of two horror films featuring Randolph Scott! Also the mad scientist is a maniac zoologist 👍). She also had an appearance in the quirky comedy The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1941; and in the biographical film The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe in 1942. At the end of her career, she appeared in the episode The Jar of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' in 1964, it was her next to last acting credit. Her birth last name has been notoriously misspelled as "Woodward" in a number of published sources.
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