Margaret Wycherly
Margaret Wycherly ( born October 26, 1881 in London, England; † June 6, 1956 in New York City, New York, United States) was a British actress.
Life
Margaret Wycherly was actually primarily a theater actress, but contact occurred sporadically in silent films on, for the first time already 34 years old in The Fight of 1915. It was after trips to Broadway, as in critically acclaimed performances in Tobacco Road and The Thirteenth Chair, finally to talkies Star by particular two roles in which she played in the film, respectively the mother of two Hollywood legends.
In Sergeant York in 1941 she played the mother of Gary Cooper. This immediately brought her a nomination for an Oscar. An even more memorable impression, however, she left the audience as the mother of James Cagney in the movie jump to his death ( White Heat ) by 1949. Here she played in an impressive way a type which was rather rare at this time in Hollywood, a union nut, the manifest has not been innocent of the psychopathic traits of her son. Wycherly embodied a woman who is not, as so often meant at this time, a good and rather passive corrective for the protagonists or as mere "femme fatale" means to an end was to the protagonists in a rather passive way into a vortex of the abyss maneuver, but in a criminal milieu standing, wily, resolute and powerful woman who has a significant influence on the psyche of her son and ultimately manipulated him for their own purposes, though from motives unreflective love for him.
Margaret Wycherley married in 1901 Bayard Veiller, together they had a son, Anthony. She died in 1956 at the age of 74 years in New York City.