Katharine Irving

Biography

Katharine Irving was born into a theatre family in New York City, New York. Her mother, Mary Katharine Gilman, left Stanford University in 1903 to begin her professional acting career, perhaps most notably as the female lead in George Ade's "Just Out of College," which ran for three years, on through her 1906 performances at New York's Lyceum Theatre. While touring with Ade's production, Gilman met Irving's father, who would become the distinguished character actor George Henry Irving. After high school graduation, Irving followed her family to Los Angeles, where they now worked in the the motion picture industry. In Hollywood, Irving signed a 1929 contract with MGM, where she worked steadily with her sister, Dorothy, and often crossed paths with her father, as in such movies as the Academy Award-winning "The Divoree." She also had a small part in one of Garbo's silent films, "The Single Standard." Katharine Irving ended her contract with MGM to marry and move to Minneapolis, Minnesota with Stanford Business School graduate Clifford H. Anderson, to whom she was happily married until her death in 1994, and with whom she raised three sons.