Jessie Ralph reached Hollywood at nearly seventy and spent eight years playing the nurses, aunts and mothers-in-law that films needed and rarely thought about. She did the thinking for them; her Peggotty in David Copperfield is the reason to know her name.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the Murdstones take over the parlour in George Cukor's David Copperfield (1935) and then watch where the boy looks. He looks at Peggotty. Jessie Ralph plays her as all bosom and apron and outrage, and once Basil Rathbone has lowered his voice and Elizabeth Allan's Clara has given up arguing, she is the only warmth left in the house. It is a small part with a good deal of standing about in it, and Ralph makes the standing about count: her disapproval is the one thing in that parlour the Murdstones cannot manage.
She had been doing this for a long time. Ralph went into stock companies at sixteen, in 1880, reached Broadway in The Kreutzer Sonata in 1906 and stayed there until 1932, playing nurses, maids and aunts, some Shakespeare, and working with George M. Cohan. When she arrived in Hollywood in 1933 she was nearly seventy and the studios knew what to do with her, which was the same thing. Between 1933 and 1941 she was Nanine, the maid to Greta Garbo's Camille (1936); Aunt Katherine Forrest in After the Thin Man (1936); Mrs Barlow in Captain Blood (1935); Cuckoo in The Good Earth (1937), a part she had also played on the stage; and W.C. Fields's mother-in-law in The Bank Dick (1940).
The work is in the scale. In One Night of Love (1934) her Angelina and Luis Alberni's Giovanni supply the comedy from stock, and both of them know how to make stock look fresh for the length of a scene, which is the whole job when the scene is all you are given. Ralph does not fuss. She lets the younger, prettier people do the moving and plants herself, so that when she does turn her head the frame has to turn with her. Grace Moore gets the light and the gowns; Ralph gets the reaction, and times it.
The limit is plain and it was not hers. The studios saw an old woman with a large chest and a stern face and cast accordingly, and eight years of grandmothers and maids does not tell us what else she might have done. We felt it in David Copperfield: when Frank Lawton takes over from Freddie Bartholomew and the film becomes a procession of chapters, Peggotty recedes, and we missed her more than we missed most of the principals. Edna May Oliver's Betsey Trotwood gets the big scenes. Ralph gets the boy's face turned towards her, and makes that enough.
If you know her from one film, make it David Copperfield, and watch the first hour with an eye on the edges of the frame. That is where she worked, and she worked there better than most people work in the middle.
Biography
Jessie Ralph was an American stage and screen actress. Born Jessie Ralph Chambers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, she made her stage debut in 1880 at the age of sixteen and appeared on Broadway from 1906, including in productions by George M. Cohan. She began film work in the 1910s but became a regular Hollywood performer from 1933, when she was nearly seventy, and appeared in around fifty-five films over the next eight years.
Ralph was known for matronly supporting roles. Her credits include Angelina in One Night of Love (1934), Clara Peggotty in David Copperfield (1935), Nanine in Camille (1936), Katherine Forrest in After the Thin Man (1936) and Mrs Hermisillo Brunch in The Bank Dick (1940). She also appeared in Captain Blood (1935), San Francisco (1936), The Good Earth (1937) and Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). She retired in 1941 after the amputation of a leg and died in Gloucester in 1944. She was married to actor William Patton.
