Catherine Proctor

Biography

Ottawa, 12 November 1879: the city’s winter hush cracked by a newborn’s first cry—Catherine Proctor had arrived. By 1915 she was already flickering across silent screens as the lead in “Not Guilty,” a courtroom drama that let audiences discover the steel behind her soft-focus gaze. Twenty-three years later she traded silence for swing-era buoyancy, stealing scenes in “Youth Takes a Fling” as the worldly aunt who could match the youngsters quip for quip. Television’s golden age beckoned in 1960; she stepped before the live cameras of “Dow Hour of Great Mysteries,” proving that a seasoned trouper could still make viewers lean forward in living-room armchairs. When the curtains finally closed, she had slipped the stage lights for good, dying quietly in Norfolk, Massachusetts, in July 1984—104 autumns after that first Ottawa snowfall.