Marion Lorne

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Marion Lorne (August 12, 1883 - May 9, 1968) was an Emmy Award winning American character actress (born Marion McDougal). She was born in West Pittston, a small mining town halfway between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania, of British immigrant parents.

Lorne studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She debuted on Broadway in 1905; she also acted in London theaters, enjoying a flourishing stage career on both sides of the Atlantic. She married playwright Walter Hackett, who died in 1944.

A latecomer to film, she was quickly typed as a befuddled, nervous, and somewhat aristocratic matron. She made her screen debut in 1951, in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, while her last film was a brief, hilarious bit as a partygoer in The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, released not long before her death.

In the early 1950s she was seen as perpetually confused high school English teacher Mrs. Gurney on the pioneering sitcom Mr. Peepers. Her last role, playing Aunt Clara in television's Bewitched, brought Lorne her widest fame. She played a lovable, forgetful witch obsessed with doorknobs who is losing her powers because of her old age and whose spells invariably end in disaster. She was in 27 episodes and was not replaced after she died of a heart attack in New York City during the fourth season. She posthumously received an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress for her work on the program.