Florence Nash

Biography

The year Florence Nash entered the world—2 October 1888—Troy, New York hummed with factory whistles and horse-drawn traffic, but the infant already had a ticket out: a voice that could stop rooms and a comic timing no one could teach. By 1914 she was brightening silent screens in Springtime, and two decades later she was trading razor-sharp barbs in the all-female battlefield of The Women (1939) and clowning her way through the breezy Depression-era romp It’s a Great Life (1935). On 2 April 1950 Hollywood’s lights dimmed for her one last time; she died in the town that had become her stage, aged 61.