June 13 - Mary Wickes

Image courtesy findagrave.com

On this day, in 1910, Mary Isabella Wickenhauser was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Mary’s parents loved the theater and began taking their daughter to see shows as soon as she was old enough to stay awake through an entire one. She was extremely intelligent for her age, ended up skipping not one but two grades and graduated from high school when she was only 16. She graduated from Washington University in 1930 with a double major of English Literature and Political Science with the intent of going into a career in law. But (and there always seems to be a but, doesn’t there), a professor said she should try a little acting, you know, just for fun. So she did. The law career never materialized.

By 1934, Mary was on Broadway having simplified her last name to Wickes. Her first show was The Farmer Takes a Wife with Henry Fonda. She followed Farmer up with runs in Stage Door, Hitch Your Wagon, Father Malachy's Miracle and Stars in Your Eyes. Her breakthrough role came in 1939 when she originated the uptight nurse Miss Preen in Kaufman and Hart’s classic comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. The show enjoyed an almost two year run and when it came time to make the film version in 1942, Mary and star Monty Woolley were the only two cast members to make the leap to the big screen.

Image courtesy trueclassics.com

The next two years were busy ones for Mary. She appeared in eleven films including the Abbott and Costello mystery Who Done It? She slowed down slightly after that, doing eight more movies through the end of the decade, perfecting her persona of the character who appears to be stodgy at first (like a nun or a secretary) but spits out the most sassy one liners by the picture’s end. Through the same time period, Mary also appeared in six more Broadway shows, ending with Town House in 1948. It would be three more decades before she returned to the Great White Way, when she spent nearly a year as Aunt Eller in a 1979 revival of Oklahoma!

Image courtesy pinterest.com

Mary’s career television career practically began with the medium itself. Though NBC had been broadcasting television since 1939 (CBS started a couple of years later), it wasn’t until after World War II that people began buying sets and actual content was needed. Mary’s first appearances came in 1948 on two episodes of Actors Studio on the brand new ABC network. She continued showing up on various anthology shows, including an episode of Studio One in Hollywood in 1949 as Mary Poppins (preceding Julie Andrews by fifteen years!). Her first series as a regular cast member came in 1953 as part of The Danny Thomas Show. She spent the first three seasons playing Liz O’neal. Over the next four decades, Mary would guest star in dozens of episodes of show ranging from whatever Lucille Ball’s latest series was to M*A*S*H to Punky Brewster to a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner in which she reprised he role of Miss Preen. She appeared as a regular cast member on eight more series, including Mrs. G. Goes to College (which earned her an Emmy nomination in 1962) and the show she’s probably best known for, Father Dowling Mysteries with Tom Bosley. She also had a few dozen supporting roles in films over the remainder of her career, including a turn as the housekeeper of the inn featured in White Christmas, Mrs. Squires in The Music Man and Aunt March in the 1994 version of Little Women.

Image courtesy chicagonow.com

Mary enjoyed a number of positions in the Disney family during her career. She first worked for the company on two of its early television shows. She was Katie, the housekeeper, for the serial Walt Disney Presents: Annette which aired during the third season of The Mickey Mouse Club and she played Dolores Bastinado in three episodes of the first season of Zorro, both in 1958. She then played a pivotal, if entirely unseen, role in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians as the live action model for the classic villain, Cruella de Vil. Thirty-one years later, Mary delighted audiences as the crusty old Sister Mary Lazarus in Touchstone Pictures’ Sister Act and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Her final role with Disney (her final role with any studio for that matter) was as a wisecracking gargoyle named Laverne in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

As Mary got older, she suffered from the usual list of illnesses that plague us all. Unfortunately for her, she fell during one of her hospitalizations and broke her hip. Complications from the resulting surgery proved to be too much for her and she died on October 22, 1995 at the age of 85. She was one recording session away from finishing her work on Hunchback; if you listen carefully, you might be able to pick out the six lines that Jane Withers had to record in her place. She never married nor did she have any children, so, besides the millions of laughs she left behind, her legacy was to use her estate to establish a $2 million memorial fund in her parent’s names at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, thereby honoring the people who planted the seeds of her remarkable career so many years before.