Sarah Edwards

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Sarah Edwards (October 11, 1881 – January 7, 1965) was a Welsh-born American film and stage actress. She often played dowagers or spinsters in numerous Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, mostly in minor roles. Edwards started her acting career as a stage actress, she was described in 1916 by a newspaper article as a leading actress "very popular with West End theatre-goers". She eventually settled in the United States and appeared in six Broadway plays between 1919 and 1931, primarily in comedies like The Merry Malones by George M. Cohan. Among her first movies was the New York-filmed 1929 musical Glorifying the American Girl (1929), where she portrayed the mercenary mother of leading actress Mary Eaton. She came to Hollywood in the mid-1930s where she appeared in about 190 films until her retirement 1951, mostly in uncredited, small character roles. Sarah Edwards died in Hollywood in 1965, aged 83.

Edwards seemed older than she was and often portrayed a "kindly grandmother, imperious dowager, hardy pioneer wife, ill-tempered teacher and strict governess". She remains perhaps best-known to modern audiences as the imperious mother of Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) in Frank Capra's film classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) who tries to keep her daughter away from George Bailey. Edwards also played a customer in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) with James Stewart. She also appeared in another Christmas classic, The Bishop's Wife (1947) with Cary Grant, and as the wife of a doctor on the train in Hitchcock's thriller Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Edwards sometimes also portrayed more substantial roles, for instance in the Charlie Chan movie Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944).