Margaret McWade

Biography

Margaret May Fish arrived in 1872 Chicago, a city of soot and swagger, and by the 1890s had traded her birth name for footlights and a partner: another Margaret—Seddon—who shared both her Christian name and a gift for deadpan comedy. Together they stitched a vaudeville routine so sweetly daft that audiences christened them the “Pixilated Sisters.” The flicker of movies lured her next. In 1914 Edison’s cameras rolled on The Drama of Heyville; under Ashley Miller’s direction she slipped into the skin of small-town rectitude opposite Marc McDermott, launching a screen career that drifted from Biograph’s rival, Vitagraph, to wherever a script needed a brisk spinster or a watchful mother. Her silhouette solidified in 1925 when First-National hoisted The Lost World up on the screen and seated her beside Wallace Beery’s bellowing Professor Challenger; as the iron-spined Mrs. Challenger she held her own against stop-motion dinosaurs and an ego the size of a plateau. Talkies arrived, and with them came smaller parts—neighbors, landladies, aunts whose sharp tongues arrived a beat before their hand-knitted shawls. She kept clocking in until 1954, when George Cukor’s It Should Happen to You offered one final close-up: a fleeting but knowing nod beside Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday, then the curtain.