Florence Bates
Florence Bates ( born April 15, 1888 in San Antonio, Texas, † January 31, 1954 in Burbank, California; actually Florence Rabe ) was an American film actress.
Life
Florence Bates, a native Florence Rabe was born in 1888 in San Antonio, Texas, the second daughter of Jewish immigrants. As a child she played the piano. However, due to a hand injury she had to give up their plans to become a successful concert pianist. After a maths degree at the University of Texas, which she successfully completed in 1906, she worked as a teacher. In 1909, she married her first husband and was soon on their profession in order to take care of their daughter Ann. However, when the marriage ended in divorce, Bates took a law degree and made 1914 after only six months studying her exams. At 26, she was one of the first women who as a lawyer earned their living in Texas. She worked for four years in this profession. After the death of her parents, she took with her sister, the family antiques business. When her sister died, and the world economic crisis began, Bates was forced to the antique store to close in 1929. In the same year she married businessman William F. Jacoby, who had come to Texas with oil wealth. When he lost his fortune, he and Bates moved to Los Angeles, where they opened a bakery together.
Mid-1930s, Bates wanted to finally prove more than 40 as an actress. In the Pasadena Playhouse, she was henceforth to see several times on stage. When she played the role of Miss Bates in a theatrical adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, she took derived from their role, the stage name of Florence Bates. In 1940 she had her first significant screen appearance as Mrs. Van Hopper vain in Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rebecca alongside Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Over the next thirteen years, she appeared as a character actress in more than 60 films. Mostly she played matronly and wealthy ladies, as in the two Lubitsch film comedies Heaven Can Wait ( Heaven Can Wait, 1943) and Cluny Brown on courting ( Cluny Brown, 1946).
Their only daughter, Ann, died in the 1940s in childbirth. After the death of her second husband in 1951, Bates own health was ' increasingly worse. Nevertheless, you appeared on TV shows such as I Love Lucy ( 1952). Florence Bates died in 1954 at the age of 65 of a heart attack. Her grave is at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.