Josephine Hull

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Josephine Hull (January 3, 1886 - March 12, 1957) was an Academy Award-winning American actress.

She had a successful 50-year career on stage before taking some of her best roles to film.

Hull was born Josephine Sherwood in Newtonville, Massachusetts. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music (Boston) and Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[edit] Career

Hull made her stage debut in stock in 1905, and after some years as a chorus girl and touring stock player, she married actor Shelley Hull (younger brother of the more well-known actor Henry Hull) in 1910. When her husband died, quite a young man, in 1919, the actress retired until 1923, when she returned under the name Josephine Hull.

Hull was a stage success in Craig's Wife (1926), and in Daisy Mayme (1926), a role which was written especially for her. Through the 1920s she continued working in the theater, and in the 1930s had three Broadway hits in You Can't Take It With You (1936), Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), and Harvey (1944).

Her last Broadway play was one of her greatest successes, starring in Solid Gold Cadillac (1954-55) which was later made into a film with the much younger Judy Holliday.

Hull made a total of five films. She brought her two best stage roles to film in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) playing a homicidal aunt, and in Harvey (1950) as the batty sister of a man whose friend is an invisible rabbit, for which she won the 1950 Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared on a number of television dramas in the early 1950's.

Hull made one more film, The Lady from Texas (1951), and appeared in a TV version of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1949, before retiring. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1957, at the age of 71.

Hull had her first major stage success in George Kelly's Pulitzer-winning Craig's Wife in 1926. Kelly wrote a role especially for her in his next play, Daisy Mayme, which also was staged in 1926. She continued working in New York theater throughout the 1920s. In the 30s, Hull scored in three great Broadway hits, as a batty matriarch in You Can't Take It With You (1936), as an dotty, charming but homicidal little old lady in Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), and in "Harvey" (1944). The plays all had long runs, and took up ten years of Hull's career.

Hull only made five films, beginning with two 1932 Fox features, After Tomorrow (recreating her stage role) and The Careless Lady. She missed out on recreating her You Can't Take It With You role in 1938, as she was still onstage with the show (Spring Byington filled in onscreen). But Hull and Canadian-born Jean Adair did play the Brewster sisters in the 1944 film Arsenic and Old Lace (starring Cary Grant), and Hull was in the screen version of Harvey as well, playing Jimmy Stewart (as the eponymous title character)'s sister. It is for that role that she won her 1950 Oscar as Best Supporting Actress.

Variety said that Hull, as "the slightly balmy aunt who wants to have Elwood committed, is immense, socking the comedy for every bit of its worth."

Hull made only one more film, The Lady from Texas (1951); she had also appeared in the CBS-TV version of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1949, with Ruth McDevitt (an actress who often succeeded Hull in her Broadway roles) as her sister.

Moving to The Bronx, Hull had been retired for some years before her death in 1957, aged 71, from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Preceded by Mercedes McCambridge for All the King's Men

Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress 1950 for Harvey

Succeeded by Kim Hunter for A Streetcar Named Desire