Before finally settling on Mary Carr, the actress was billed as Mary Kennevan, Mary Kennevean, Mrs. William Carr and Mrs. Carr. On stage since the early 1890s, Mary entered films in 1916, spending the next four decades portraying kindly, self-sacrificing mothers and grandmothers. Her best-known roles of this ilk were the title character in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1919) and the careworn matriarch in Over the Hill to the Poorhouse (1920). Offscreen, Mrs. Carr was described as a "brisk young matron" who lived and dressed fashionably and approached each role with girlish enthusiasm. Her lampoonish performance as the tremulous victim of villainous mortgage-holder Jimmy Finlayson in the 1931 Laurel and Hardy 2-reeler One Good Turn revealed a hitherto untapped sense of sly humor. After turning sixty, Mrs. Carr appeared in only a handful of films, usually in fleeting bits (her name appears in the "list of casualties" scene in Gone With the Wind [1939]). Her last performance was a one-scene cameo in the 1956 historical drama Friendly Persuasion. Mary Carr was the mother of prolific film and TV director Thomas Carr.
by Hal Erickson
biography
