Cora Witherspoon

Cora Witherspoon (January 5, 1890 – November 17, 1957) was an American stage and film character actress whose career spanned nearly half a century. She began in theatre where she remained rooted even after entering motion pictures in the early 1930s. As Witherspoon’s career progressed, she carved a niche playing haughty society women or harridan housewives such as Princess Lina in Ferenc Molnár's 1928 play Olympia, or Agatha Sousè, W.C. Fields’ domineering spouse in the 1940 film The Bank Dick. John Springer and Jack Hamilton, authors of They Had Faces Then: Super Stars, Stars, and Starlets of the 1930s (1974), wrote that "Witherspoon was blessed with a face that might have been drawn by one of those cartoonists who specialize in dealing with the war between men and women." In his 1975 autobiography, Tennessee Williams: Memoirs, Williams told of his time in 1941 as a night shift elevator operator at the San Jacinto Hotel in Manhattan. Among the hotel’s guests at the time was Witherspoon who, according to Williams, employed him or the hotel’s telephone operator, a budding poet, to pick up her morphine prescription from an all-night pharmacy. She used to rap with me and the poet till nearly day break in the San Jacinto lobby. Her “fix” would never wear itself out till first cock’s crow. Then the poet and I would sort of lift her into the lift, the poet would open her bedroom door and I would get her to the edge of her bed and let her drop on it. "What would I do without you boys?" she’d murmured with that sweet sad wisdom of the old who knows “all will pass.”