Canadian character actress Maude Eburne studied elocution in Toronto, gleaning a talent for dialects. She carried over this skill into her earliest stage work in Ontario and upstate New York. Eburne's first Broadway appearance was as a love-hungry cockney maid in the 1914 stage farce A Pair of Sixes; she spent the next fifteen years specializing in comic servants on stage. She came to films in 1931, as the eternally frightened companion of mystery authoress Grayce Hampton in The Bat Whispers (1931). Most of her film roles can best be described as "eccentric," ranging from dotty aristocrats to pipe-smoking harridans. Among her more prominent roles were Fay Wray's tremulous aunt in Vampire Bat (1933), a rambunctious frontierswoman in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), half-mad recluse Borax Betty in Glamour Boy (1941), Susan Hayward's slatternly mother in Among the Living (1942), and Jean Hersholt's housekeeper in six Dr. Christian (all "B "films of the 1930s and 1940s). Maude Eburne retired from the screen after appearing in the religious semi-epic The Prince of Peace (1951).
by Hal Erickson
biography
