Mary Boland (born Marie Anne Boland; January 28, 1882 – June 23, 1965) was an American stage and film actress.
Early years
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Boland was the daughter of repertory actor William Augustus Boland,[1] and his wife Mary Cecilia Hatton. She had an older sister named Sara.[2] The family later moved to Detroit.
Boland went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Detroit. By age fifteen she had left school and was performing on stage.
In 1901, she began acting on stage with a local stock theater company.[1]
Career
She debuted on Broadway in 1907 in the play The Ranger[3] with Dustin Farnum and had appeared in eleven Broadway productions, notably with John Drew, becoming his "leading lady in New York and on the road."[4] She made her silent film debut for Triangle Studios in 1915. She entertained soldiers in France during World War I and then returned to America. After appearing in nine movies, she left filmmaking in 1920, returning to the stage and appearing in several Broadway productions, including The Torch-Bearers (1922). She became famous as a comedian.
Boland's greatest success on the stage in the 1920s was the comedy The Cradle Snatchers[5] (1925–26), in which she, Edna May Oliver, and Margaret Dale, having been abandoned by their husbands, take on young lovers. Roy Liebman notes this play helped establish the persona that would be associated with her for the rest of her career. Boland's paramour was Humphrey Bogart in one of his first roles. She had previously performed with Bogart in the 1923 comedy Meet the Wife at the Klaw Theatre as Gertrude Lennox.
After an eleven-year absence, in 1931, she returned to Hollywood under contract to Paramount Pictures. She achieved far greater film success with her second try, becoming one of the most popular character actresses of the 1930s, always playing major roles in her films and often starring, notably in a series of comedies opposite Charles Ruggles.
For the remainder of her career, Boland combined films and, later, television productions, with appearances on stage, including starring in the 1935 Cole Porter musical Jubilee and appearing in the play "One Fine Day" with Charlie Ruggles in 1948.[6] Her last Broadway appearance was in 1954 at the age of seventy-two. That play, Lullaby, was unsuccessful.[citation needed] Her last acting was in the 1955 television adaptation of The Women recreating her film role.
