Pauline Lord on AllMovie

A stage actress from the age of 13, Pauline Lord made her Broadway debut in 1912. She became a major star nine years later as Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Lord didn't get to play the role in the 1923 screen version, veteran film star Blanche Sweet was chosen instead, and by the time of the 1930 remake she had become too old. Lord instead made her screen bow as Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934), but W.C. Fields was also in it, and hardly anybody remembers her. The following year she played one of those lachrymose 1930s mothers in A Feather in Her Hat (1935), after which she hurried back to Broadway. The veteran trouper died of a heart ailment in a hospital in Alamogordo, NM, while touring as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie.