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Hermione Gingold (December 9, 1897-May 24, 1987)
was a United Kingdom|British actress known for her
sharp-tongued, eccentric persona, an image
enhanced by her sharp nose and chin, as well as
her deepening voice, a result of vocal nodes which
her mother encouraged her not to remove. She
appeared on stage, on radio, in films, on
television, and in recordings.

Born Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold in London, she
was the daughter of an high-class Austrian Jewish
financier and an English housewife. She was a
childhood friend of Noel Coward until her mother
warned her away from him. First appearing on stage
in 1909, she was originally a coloratura soprano
and performed in Shakespearean dramas such as "The
Merchant of Venice" and "Troilus and Cressida" and
worked with Charles Hawtrey as an understudy. In
the 1930s, her quirky, ribald comedic sense became
famous through musical revues. She married British
publisher Michael Joseph in 1918, with whom she
had two sons, Stephen and Leslie. After her
divorce in 1926, she married writer and lyricist
Eric Maschwitz, whom she divorced in 1945.

Gingold was introduced to US servicemen during
World War II through the London revue "Sweet and
Low."  After moving to the United States in 1951,
Gingold became a great success there as well. She
won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting
Actress - Motion Picture|Golden Globe Award for
Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the
1958 movie Gigi (1958 movie)|Gigi in which she
played Madame Alvarez, a retired Paris courtesan
who was Gigi's grandmother and mentor. She sang "I
Remember it Well" with Maurice Chevalier. She also
performed in the Broadway show "Oh Dad, Poor
Dad...Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm
Feeling So Sad" in 1963.

Gingold played the mayor's snooty wife Eulalie
Mackechnie Shinn in The Music Man (1962), starring
Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, and was part of
the original 1973 Broadway cast of A Little Night
Music in the role of Mme. Armfeldt, which she
reprised on film.

In 1977, with conductor Karl Bohm, she won a
Grammy Award for Best Album for Children for
Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns:
Carnival of the Animals. She was a regular guest
on television talk shows, especially Jack Paar's,
where audiences loved her stories. She is quoted
as saying, "Fighting is essentially a masculine
idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue." She died of
heart problems and pneumonia in 1987 at the age of
89, although she disputed the year of birth (1897)
assigned to her. Her autobiography "How to Grow
Old Disgracefully" was published posthumously in
1988.

==External links==
*imdb name|id=0320006|name=Hermione Gingold
*http://users.bestweb.net/~foosie/gingold.htm
Hermione Gingold -Foosie focuses on her revues
*http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?id=42261
International Broadway Database