Margaret Bowman

Margaret Bowman (February 14, 1928 – August 13, 2018) was an American actress.

Career Bowman's early career included musical theater in Nashville, Tennessee and Stages Repertory Theater in Houston, Texas. A method actor, she first took acting classes at her local YMCA while in her 50s, when she "decided to reinvent" herself after spending the first part of her adult life as a homemaker. She later was accepted into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, California.

Bowman was primarily a character actor for film and television. Her first on-screen role was "Mrs. Flora Hawkins" in The Fulfillment of Mary Gray (1989). Between 1989 and her death in 2018, Bowman primarily appeared in bit roles, such as "Old Nanny" in three episodes of A Woman of Independent Means (1995), and as "Fat Lady" in The Lone Ranger (2013). Bowman would spend her free time observing people and inventing backstories for the characters she imagined they were, saying, "If you want to be a good character actor, you have to observe the people around you." In 1995, Bowman was cast by Tommy Lee Jones in the TNT TV movie The Good Old Boys, as "an old woman, Mrs. Faversham, whose mind has gone." Jones, who had a reputation for being cantankerous, called her work "exquisite." Actor Michael McKean said, "it's one of the most hilarious scenes on film this year. There's an actress named Margaret Bowman, who had a bit part in Waiting for Guffman. But in this, she just nails the world's worst dragon waitress. You just fall in love with her. She has one little scene and she kind of steals the picture."

She sang bass in a barbershop quartet for "many years."

Filmography