Catherine Doucet

Biography

A onetime schoolmarm who traded chalk dust for greasepaint, Catherine Calhoun stepped onto the New York boards in 1906 as a Harvard undergraduate in the hit *Brown of Harvard*, sharing scenes with Laura Hope Crews. For the next fourteen years she kept her birth name; marriage to fellow actor Paul Doucet in 1920 nudged her into a new identity and, almost by accident, into a specialty in bright, brittle comedy. New York howled with approval when she surfaced as the title drifter in *Miss Lulu Bett* (1920-21) and, two seasons later, as the uproariously harassed Ma Potter in *The Potters* (1923-24). Hollywood occasionally lured her west before 1935, but only in small, forgettable bits. The turning point arrived with *These Three* (1936): as Lily Mortar, the self-absorbed aunt who helps detonate the tragedy swirling around Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, Doucet delivered what *Times* reviewer Frank S. Nugent called “a flawless study in vain, vaporous selfishness.” The notice unlocked a late-career gold mine of indomitable dowagers, society dragons, and fluttering aunts. She repeated her sparkling comic turn in both the stage and screen incarnations of *As Husbands Go* and matched wits with W.C. Fields as the formidable Mrs. Wendell in *Poppy* (1936), forever cementing her place as the era’s sharpest, most elegantly exasperated matron.