Sunday 20 June 2010

Little old ladies vs Glam Rock goth



Here's an obscure one - Miss Mildred Natwick would have been 105 today had she lived.

A little amusement that we and our good friend Alistair have shared over the years is the "Whatever happened to...?" game, whereby we pick some obscure (and often bizarrely-named) actors, actresses or singers and recall what they were famous for, and where they ended up.

One of our favourite names in this was the delightful Mildred Natwick, star of Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry and John Ford's The Quiet Man in the 1950s. As a child I remember her appearing in one of the many marvellous US "genre detective" series of the 1970s [you know what I mean - we had the bald one (Kojak), the fat one (Cannon), the scruffy one (Columbo), the cowboy one (McCloud), the married couple ones (McMillan & Wife) and so on...].

In The Snoop Sisters Miss Natwick and Miss Helen Hayes (another doyenne of old Hollywood) played "the elderly lady ones" - a sort of Stateside take on Miss Marple in stereo. Remarkably, one of the episodes I remember had a very special guest indeed - none other than the "shock rocker" of the Glam era, Alice Cooper... What a bizarre combination! Now I find someone has found a clip from that particular episode and posted it on YouTube - deep joy!


And the closing titles of The Snoop Sisters just in case anyone remembers them...


And where did Miss Natwick end up? She continued her "professional old lady" supporting actress role well up until she was in her 80s - her last role was as Madame de Rosemonde in Dangerous Liaisons - before ill-health forced her to retire and she died at the grand old age of 89 in 1994.

Mildred Natwick on IMDB

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