Cora Witherspoon

Cora Witherspoon (January 5, 1890 – November 17, 1957) was an American stage and film character actress whose career spanned nearly half a century. She began in theatre where she remained rooted even after entering motion pictures in the early 1930s. As Witherspoon's career progressed, she carved a niche playing haughty society women or harridan housewives such as Princess Lina in Ferenc Molnár's 1928 play Olympia, or Agatha Sousè, W.C. Fields’ domineering spouse in the 1940 film The Bank Dick. John Springer and Jack Hamilton, authors of They Had Faces Then: Super Stars, Stars, and Starlets of the 1930s, wrote that "Witherspoon was blessed with a face that might have been drawn by one of those cartoonists who specialize in dealing with the war between men and women."

Early life

Witherspoon was born in New Orleans, to Cora S. Bell and Henry Edgeworth Witherspoon. Her father was an assistant surgeon with the Confederate Army during the American Civil War while her mother was an aunt of the civil rights advocate Judge John Minor Wisdom. Witherspoon was orphaned by age 10 and raised at least in part by her older sister, Maud, who, while still in her teens founded the Maud Witherspoon Rag Doll Manufacturing Company. Witherspoon's ancestors had reportedly once owned Ellington Plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.

Stage Witherspoon made her professional stage debut in 1905 with a New Orleans stock company. She first appeared in New York at the Belasco Theatre in the 1910 hit comedy The Concert, which was Leo Ditrichstein's adaptation of the stage play, in which the 20-year-old actress portrayed the 76-year-old Edith Gordon. Witherspoon appeared with Ditrichstein in September 1913 for a four-month run at the Belasco and briefly the Theatre Republic playing Fanny Lamont in The Temperamental Journey, from the comedy Pour Vivre Heureux by André Rivoire and Yves Mirandeis. From September 1914 into the following May at the Gaiety Theatre, she played Sally McBride in Jean Webster's comedy Daddy Long Legs.

Witherspoon had a long run between November 1915 and June 1916 at the Longacre Theatre as Mrs. Van Ness in The Great Lover, another play by Ditrichstein, written in collaboration with Fanny and Frederic Hatton.

In 1926 Witherspoon was a member of the summer stock cast at Denver's Elitch Theatre, where she performed with Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, and Beulah Bondi.

She remained active on stage for another three decades often in long-running Broadway plays, such as:

Death Witherspoon died in 1957, aged 67, at Las Cruces, New Mexico and interred at the Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans. She was survived by her sister Maud.