15 Facts About Gladys Cooper

Dame Gladys Constance Cooper was an English actress, theatrical manager and producer, whose career spanned seven decades on stage, in films and on television.

Gladys Cooper managed the Playhouse Theatre from 1917 to 1934, where she starred in many roles.

Gladys Cooper received three Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress, for performances in The Song of Bernadette, My Fair Lady and, most famously, Now, Voyager.

Gladys Cooper spent most of her childhood in Chiswick, where her family moved when she was an infant.

Gladys Cooper made her stage debut in 1905 touring with Seymour Hicks in his musical Bluebell in Fairyland and was becoming a popular photographic model.

In 1913 Gladys Cooper appeared in her first film, The Eleventh Commandment, going on to make several more silent films during the First World War and shortly afterwards.

Gladys Cooper continued full-time stage work including appearances as Lady Agatha Lazenby in The Admirable Crichton in 1916 and Clara de Foenix in Trelawny of the Wells.

Gladys Cooper appeared in W Somerset Maugham's Home and Beauty in 1919, repeated Dora at His Majesty's Theatre in 1920 and elsewhere thereafter, and both produced and played numerous roles at the Playhouse Theatre.

For both the 1923 and 1924 Christmas shows at the Adelphi Theatre, Gladys Cooper played the title character in Peter Pan, while playing several other roles at that theatre during those two years.

Gladys Cooper was Dorothy Hilton in Call it a Day, again in both London and New York, from 1935 to 1936.

Gladys Cooper turned to film full-time in 1940, finding success in Hollywood in a variety of character roles and was frequently cast as a disapproving, aristocratic society woman, although she sometimes played lively, approachable types, as she did in Rebecca.

Gladys Cooper was nominated three times for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performances as Bette Davis's domineering mother in Now, Voyager, a sceptical nun in The Song of Bernadette, and Rex Harrison's mother, Mrs Higgins, in My Fair Lady.

Gladys Cooper received two nominations for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, for her roles in The Chalk Garden and A Passage to India.

Gladys Cooper had various television roles in the 1950s and '60s.

Gladys Cooper lived mostly in England in her final years and died from pneumonia in 1971 at the age of 82 in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.