by Hal Erickson
biography
The daughter of actors Theodore Westman and Lily Wren, Nydia Westman joined the family vaudeville act as a child. Westman was seen on Broadway from 1920, and in films from 1932. A short, pudgy lady with an air of perpetual consternation, she was ideally cast as maids, busybodies and spinsters. She was at her best fending off the wisecrackery of Bob Hope in 1939's Cat and the Canary. Westman returned to the stage full-time in the early 1950s, then resumed her film and TV career in the last decade of her life; among her credits was the regular role of Mrs. Featherstone in the 1962 TV-series adaptation of Going My Way.
