Biography
Maidie Norman was an American actress and educator. Born Maidie Ruth Gamble on 16 October 1912 in Villa Rica, Georgia, she earned a B.A. from Bennett College in 1934 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1937. She trained at the Actors Lab in Hollywood between 1946 and 1949.
Norman made her film debut in The Peanut Man (1947) and appeared in supporting roles in films including Written on the Wind (1956) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which she played Elvira Stitt. She also had television roles in series such as The Twilight Zone, Kung Fu, Little House on the Prairie and Roots: The Next Generation. In the 1960s and 1970s she worked as an artist-in-residence at Stanford University and as a lecturer and teacher at UCLA, where she created a course on the history of Black theatre in America.
Norman was a founding member of the American Negro Theater West. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1977, and an annual award for undergraduate research in Black theatre is named after her at UCLA. She died on 2 May 1998 in San Jose, California.
