Cora Witherspoon spent more than twenty years on screen playing the woman at the party nobody wanted to sit beside: society hostesses, meddling relatives, wives with opinions. She did it in a couple of scenes at a time, and on our evidence she earned them.
Fi1m perspective
In Libeled Lady (1936) she is Mrs Burns-Norvell, a shipboard gossip with a daughter to marry off, and that is the whole trade in one part: a woman with a position to keep and a plan for somebody else. Witherspoon played these women as if it had never crossed their minds that they might not be listened to. The chin goes up, the voice stays level, and the person she is talking to becomes a problem to be managed. She was never the star's friend. She was the reason the star started looking for the door.
She came to it early and by an odd route. She was on stage in a New Orleans stock company around 1905, and when she reached Broadway in 1910, in The Concert, she was twenty years old and playing an elderly woman. She kept that habit. Dozens of Broadway productions followed, through to 1946, and when Hollywood took her on in 1931 it was for small parts of the same kind, haughty society women, acidulous spinsters, imperious matrons. She kept her New York base throughout and worked in films and early television until 1954, where her last screen appearance was an uncredited saleslady at Macy's in It Should Happen to You. There was no ingénue phase to grow out of. She started old and stayed there.
The type suited her and it also boxed her in. The Women (1939) put her among an all-female cast as Mrs Van Adams; Dark Victory (1939) gave her Carrie in the Bette Davis melodrama, one of her better-known dramatic parts, and our review of that film does not single her out at all, which is the other side of a career in unsympathetic supporting roles: the parts are small enough to vanish. The one most people remember is Agatha Sousé, W.C. Fields's wife in The Bank Dick (1940). We have not reviewed it, so we will only say that a henpecking wife opposite Fields is exactly the job she had spent thirty years learning to do.
What we can vouch for is Libeled Lady. Powell, Loy, Harlow and Tracy talk their way through Jack Conway's farce and the smaller parts have to be sketched fast or not at all; Witherspoon and Charley Grapewin each get a couple of scenes and make them count. Our honest reaction was that she was gone before we had properly settled into disliking her, and we were sorry about it, because disliking her was clearly going to be fun. That is the character actor's bargain. You do the work, the film moves on, and the audience takes you for the furniture.
If you want to see what she did, watch Libeled Lady for its stars and keep an eye on the deck. She will be the one with the plan.
Biography
Cora Witherspoon was an American stage and film actress. She began her career in the theatre, making her Broadway debut in 1910, and continued appearing in stage productions into the 1940s while also working in Hollywood from the early 1930s.
She is credited in films including Libeled Lady (1936) as Mrs. Burns-Norvell, The Women (1939) as Mrs. Van Adams, Dark Victory (1939) as Carrie, The Bank Dick (1940) as Agatha Sousé, Dodge City (1939) as Mrs. McCoy and It Should Happen to You (1954) as a Macy's saleslady.
