Hermione Gingold

A justly beloved, somewhat bizarre-looking English character player, Hermione Gingold delighted millions with her typically haughty, imperious manner, a slight lisp in her voice and a richly fruity, theatrical line delivery. Gingold most often played middle-aged or elderly, whimsical eccentrics or self-righteous, gorgon-like "pillars" of the community. Though much of her lengthy, distinguished career was spent on the stage, Gingold did spread her legendary, hilarious magic through a number of films, including "Bell, Book and Candle" (1958), as one of a covens of amusing, dotty witches, and "The Music Man" (1962), as a commanding, small-town dragon of a matron who stages a human sculpture as an "Ode to a Grecian Urn."

Gingold was ideal in Dickensian territory as part of the motley crew of eccentrics in the 1952 film adaptation of "The Pickwick Papers." By contrast, in "Gigi" (1958), she was warm, wise and witty as Leslie Caron's sympathetic, solicitous grandmother, joining Maurice Chevalier for an enchanting and moving duet on the perils and joys of human memory and the twilight of romance, "I Remember It Well." The unique Gingold was a splendid trouper on the stage well into her later years (as in Stephen Sondheim's marvelous "A Little Night Music" in the 70s), and her very occasional feature credits extend up until shortly before her death.