Hull, Josephine (1886–1957)

American character actress who won an Academy Award for her performance in Harvey. Name variations: Josephine Sherwood. Born Josephine Sherwood in Newtonville, Massachusetts, on January 3, 1886; died on March 12, 1957; daughter of William Henry (an importer) and Mary (Tewksbury) Sherwood (a board of education executive); attended schools in Newtonville; graduated from Radcliffe College; married Shelley Vaughn Hull (an actor), in 1910 (died 1919).

Selected theater:

portrayed Penelope Vanderhof Sycamore in You Can't Take It With You (Booth Theater, New York, December 1936); Abby Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace (Fulton Theater, New York, April 1940); Vita Simmons in Harvey (Forty-eighth Street Theater, New York, 1944); Laura Partridge in The Solid Gold Cadillac (Belasco Theater, New York, 1954).

Filmography:

After Tomorrow (1932); Careless Lady (1932); Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); Harvey (1950); The Lady From Texas (1951).

An endearing actress known for her portrayals of eccentric old ladies, Josephine Hull was born in 1886, grew up in Newtonville, Massachusetts, and attended Radcliffe College, where she sang in the glee club and acted in school plays. After completing her education, she joined the Castle Square Stock Company in Boston, making her stage debut under the name of Sherwood in 1905. The young actress then toured with George Ober's company in What Happened to Jones? and Why Smith Left Home. Other early tours included roles in The Law and the Man, Way Down East, Paid in Full, and The Bridge.

In 1910, Josephine married Shelley Hull, a well-known actor, and retired from the stage. After her husband's untimely death in 1919, she returned to the theater as a director for Jessie Bonstelle 's stock company in Detroit, Michigan. "I had decided I was through with acting," she said later, "but you know what a stock company is. I found myself filling in each week." After a year in Detroit, Hull returned to New York to become the director of Equity Players but, more often than not, found herself back on stage. Hull directed a performance of Roger Bloomer in 1923, and that same year attracted attention in the role of Mrs. Hicks in Neighbors. She also scored a hit as Mrs. Frazier in George Kelly's Pulitzer prize-winning play Craig's Wife (1926).

Over the next ten or so years, Hull appeared in so many unsuccessful plays that she considered giving up acting and going into writing. A turning point for the actress was the role of Penelope Vanderhof Sycamore ("Penny"), the spacey author-sculptor in the 1937 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy You Can't Take It With You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. That play, which enjoyed a 103-week run, was closely followed by Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), the Lindsay and Crouse comedy in which Hull and actress Effie Shannon played two elderly sisters who poison their lonely boarders with arsenic-laced elderberry wine. During the play's run of 1,444 performances, Hull was given a leave of absence in order to recreate her role in the movie version which starred Cary Grant.

Hull scored a theatrical hat-trick with yet a third comic triumph in Mary Coyle Chase 's Harvey, a fantasy about a lovable dipsomaniac who befriends an invisible seven-foot rabbit. The play began a four-year run on Broadway in November 1944, with Frank Fay as the delusional Elwood and Hull as his distraught sister Veta Simmons. Variety hailed her performance as a "masterpiece," and The New York Times commented: "Flighty and wide-eyed, Miss Hull is a perfect foil for Mr. Fay's casual ease." In 1947, Fay was replaced by James Stewart, who also played Elwood in the 1951 movie. Hull was also cast in the film and won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

Josephine Hull was often singled out for her superior performances in otherwise lackluster plays; such was the case with the comedy Minnie and Mr. Williams (1948), in which she played a Welsh minister's wife opposite Eddie Dowling. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, who called the play "thin and artless," nonetheless adored Hull. "Puffing and flouncing cheerfully around the stage," he wrote, "she plays it with an extraordinary lightness—humorous and motherly, impish and beneficent." Hull was also the only bright note in her next three vehicles: The Golden State, which ran for only 25 performances in 1951, Kin Hubbard, which tried out in Westport, Connecticut, in the summer of 1951, and Whistler's Grandmother, in 1952. "What Mrs. Hull needs," a reviewer from The New York Times suggested, "is a playwright half as sublime as she is."

In the meantime, Hull also made numerous television appearances, making the most of her eccentric old-woman persona. "I'm very happy that I'm frankly a character woman, when I see what the camera does to so many faces on the screen," she said. In 1954, however, Hull had

another successful turn on Broadway as the dowdy Laura Partridge, the stockholder whose questions bring a corporate giant to its knees in The Solid Gold Cadillac. Hailed as "an occasion of great rejoicing … a howling hit," by William Hawkins (World Telegram), the play was a perfect vehicle for the actress, but sadly her last. Josephine Hull, called "everybody's favorite actress," died in 1957.