Georgia Simmons

Biography

Nora Allene Simmons was born and grew up in Zebulon, Georgia. For a time, she was a grammar school teacher in Stone Mountain. She began her career as an entertainer with a traveling Chautauqua troupe and later served as official storyteller for the Joel Chandler Harris Memorial Association in Atlanta. After briefly appearing on Broadway, she spent two years with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago. In the 1920s, she became a staff artist at KGO radio in San Francisco. Although producers reportedly told her at first that she would never make it in radio or films if she did not lose her natural Southern accent, this proved not to be the case. Although she was white (Caucasian), she originated the "Colored Supplement" of NBC's Morning Magazine and wrote the "Magnolia, Henry and Charlie" episodes which provided the comedy features of the Wednesday morning program. She also wrote the Monday night feature, "Plantation Echoes". In 1930, she accepted an invitation to Honolulu to appear as a guest artist on a radio station there. Instead, she returned to Atlanta temporarily due to homesickness. She soon returned to Los Angeles and radio, and later had several minor roles in motion pictures during the 1930s and 1940s. Branching out into television roles, she still appeared in a few movies, even traveling to Italy in 1962 to appear as Marcello Mastroianni's grandmother in director Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963). Never having married, she retired in the late 1960s and returned to Georgia, living on Social Security until her death in 1980, aged 96.