Josephine Crowell

Biography

Josephine Crowell crossed the footlights long before cameras turned: a Nova Scotia girl who trod the vaudeville boards in 1879 and never looked back. Film found her in middle age and made her cinema’s favourite fierce matriarch—most indelibly as the panic-stricken mother in Griffith’s incendiary The Birth of a Nation (1915). Comic lightning struck later: she chased Harold Lloyd through Speedy (1928) and matched wits with Laurel & Hardy in Wrong Again (1929), proving a scowl could be as funny as a pratfall. In between, royalty suited her; she wore ermine and disdain in quick succession as queens and princesses in Main Street (1923), Mantrap (1926), The King of Kings (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), reigning over each scene she graced.