Final Rest Stops: Two Mildreds of Baltimore

The two Mildreds —  Mildred Natwick and Mildred Dunnock — who were both born and raised in Baltimore, later went onto successful and memorable Broadway, Hollywood and TV careers.

Natwick earned acclaim and adulation for her comedic portrayals of eccentric characters which she often played with a delightfully nervous tremulous voice, while Dunnock’s reputation was for giving depth to strong female characters such as Linda Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

Recently, Turner Classic Movies aired one of Natwick’s truly hilarious roles as Ethel Banks, in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.”

She had created the Banks role with “great comic ingenuity,” according to a 1963 Baltimore Sun profile of the actress, when “Barefoot” was a Broadway play.

In 1967, she reprised her role playing the mother of Corie Bratter, a free-spirited newlywed played by Jane Fonda, who moves into a leaky Greenwich Village fifth floor walkup with her husband, Paul, a conservative lawyer, played by Robert Redford.

There is no elevator — which becomes a running gag throughout the picture — which was directed by Gene Saks.

In an initial scene, Banks trying to be supportive of her daughter’s real estate decision and after traversing five flights of stairs while dragging a huge purse and dressed formally including a hat, wheezes to a stop, looks out of the window of the fifth floor apartment and desperately trying to find something complimentary to say, observes, “Oh, my Corie, you can see New Jersey from here.”

Hilarity intensifies when Corie tries to hook up Banks, who is either widowed or divorced — we don’t know — with Victor Velasco, a gourmet and artist neighbor played to romantic perfection by the elegant Charles Boyer. 

The movie is a tour de force and is Natwick at her ditzy best.

Born in Baltimore and raised on Greenberry Road in Mount Washington, Natwick was of Norwegian ancestry.

Her father, Joseph Natwick, was the owner of a wholesale lumber company, and the old Dunloggin Dairy, which legend says, was named for a tract of land which he owned and once timbered, and then established a dairy which he named Dunloggin because he was “done logging.”

Her mother was Mildred Marion Dawes.

Natwick  was a student at the old Bryn Mawr School, which was then at Cathedral and Preston streets in the old Deutsches Haus, now the site of the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

In a 1965 “I Remember” in The Sun Magazine, she dreamily recalled looking out of a school window staring at the clock on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Mount Royal Station tower, wondering how much longer it was until  dismissal when she could run to Irvin’s Bakery on Charles Street to buy Kossuth cakes drenched with strawberry icing.

Her first role came when she was 7 when she played “Cinderella” in a school production, and continued doing so until 1924 when she graduated.

Her 1924 Bryn Mawr School yearbook describes her as the “wittiest” and in addition to her theatrical roles, she played varsity basketball and was athletic editor of the Bryn Mawrtyr, the school yearbook.

After graduating from the old Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, Natwick made the rounds in New York trying to find work as an actress, and after being unsuccessful, returned to Baltimore when she joined the Vagabonds. 

She later became a member of the National Children’s Theater in Washington, where she met a young actor, Henry Fonda.

She later began performing with the University Players at the old Maryland Theater in Baltimore.

“The University Players came to Baltimore after being started by some Princeton boys, including Josh Logan and Henry Fonda, got them to see me in the Vagabonds, and I got the job,” Natwick told The Sun in 1963.

“I went to summer theater in Falmouth, Mass., and a New York producer saw me in two plays in summer stock, wanted one for New York and there I was on Broadway in ‘Carrie Nation.'”

Natwick made her Broadway debut in 1932 in the role of Mrs. Noble in “Carrie Nation.”

Her first film role was in John Ford’s 1940 movie, “The Long Voyage Home,” where she played Freda, a Cockney slattern. The film also starred John Wayne and Thomas Mitchell.

Other film roles included ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “The Quiet Man,” “The Trouble With Harry,” “The Court Jester,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Late George Apley” and “Cheaper By the Dozen.” 

She also made the transition to television in the early days and subsequently appeared in scores of productions through the years including “Alfred Hitchcok presents,” “Naked City,” “Blithe Spirit” as the hilarious eccentric medium Madame Arcati, “McMillan & Wife,” and “The Snoop Sisters,” with Helen Hayes, for which she won an Emmy award. 

Her final TV appearance was Sarah Cleason in the 1987 TV movie “Deadly Deception.”

During her Broadway career, she was nominated twice for Tony Awards.

For decades, she lived in a Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan.

“She was unique and was wonderful when she played timid old spinsters. She specialized in playing older women — even when she was in her 20s and 30s — and seldom played characters her own age until she got older,” the late Gerald Bordman, noted American theater scholar and author, told The Sun in 1994 at her death at 89 in 1994.

“She conveyed an unusual warmth which came across the footlights,” he said.

In 1994, Bryn Mawr School announced that the lobby in Centennial Hall, which houses the school’s theater, was dedicated as the Mildred Natwick Lobby.

It was her request that the honor be announced after her death.

She is buried in Lorraine Park Cemetery in Woodlawn, with an entablature that simply states her name, birth and death years, leaving a passerby with no clue as to the professional identity of the theatrical greatness reposing there.

Also a Baltimorean, Mildred Dorothy Dunnock, was raised at 2317 Maryland Ave., and while attending the old Western High School on Gwynns Falls Parkway, her theatrical interests were piqued when her teacher asked her to read from the Bible at a class assembly.

“The experience disclosed that though I was a shy little thing I had a voice,” Dunnock explained in a 1949 interview in The Sun Magazine. “The discovery gave me confidence and led to my playing Lady Gwendolyn Fairfax in that hardy perennial, Ocsar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.'”

After graduating from Western in 1918, she entered Goucher College, then located at 23rd and St. Paul streets, where she became an active member of Agora, the college’s dramatic society.

“I like Baltimore, but it has some unhappy memories for me,” she told The Evening Sun in 1942. “You see, I used to play male leads in Goucher plays before men were allowed in the casts. And I recall with shame the times my voice would suddenly change from my assumed baritone to a girlish soprano. It always happened in the most dramatic scenes.”

Her family were less than supportive of her choice to pursue a career in the theater, and preferred that she get married and become a homemaker.

It was a college counselor who offered encouragement when she suggested that Dunnock earn a master’s degree in theater.

“My father was astounded, but she told him that I had the theater in me. It put a bee in my bonnet, I guess,” she told The Sun during a 1972 visit to the city.

“These were the days before psychoanalysis, so I found therapy in the theater. I was timid and shy, but I found in the theater an outlet. It freed me. Goucher opened that door.”

After graduating from Goucher in 1922, she taught at Friends School where she also directed theater productions, while acting in shows at the Johns Hopkins University and the Vagabond Players, where she made her 1924 debut in Somerset Maugham’s “Penelope.”

She moved to New York and earned a master’s degree in theater at Columbia, while teaching at Brearley, a private girls’ school in the city.

Dunnock made her Broadway debut in 1932 playing Miss Pinty in “Life Begins.”

By the 1940s, she was a regular on Broadway and played roles in “Foolish Notion” that starred Tallulah Bankhead, and “Lute Song” with Mary Martin, and “The Corn is Green” with the great Ethel Barrymore.

She did additional studies at the Actors Studio, of which she was a founding member, working closely with Lee Strasberg and Elie Kazan.

“She was small and slight with a thin, mobile mouth, and she excelled at playing the parts of mothers and eccentric ladies of various kinds,” The New York Times noted at her death in 1991. “Her admirers praised her power to move audiences by making them care for the characters she portrayed.”

No less than the role of Linda Loman, which she originated in the original 1949 production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” playing the wife of Willy Loman, opposite Lee J. Cobb.

Her performance earned her rave notices from New York critics and for the memorable line she spoke about her beleaguered and broken-down husband, that “attention must be paid.”

She reprised the role in the 1951 film which earned her an Academy Award nomination, and she recreated the character in a 1966 CBS TV production, which earned her an Emmy the next year. 

Other memorable Broadway roles included Big Mama in Tennesse Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Film roles included John O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8” in 1960, and “Sweet Bird of Youth.”

Her last Hollywood movie was “The Pick-up Artists” in 1987 that also starred Robert Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald.

Perhaps her most terrifying film role was as Ma Rizzo in Henry Hathaway’s “Kiss of Death,” a noir classic, whose screenplay was written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, and stars Karl Malden, Brian Donlevy, Richard Widmark and Coleen Gray.

Widmark plays Tommy Udo, an ex-convict and psychopath, who exacts revenge on Ma Rizzo, who is wheelchair bound, and whose son is an underworld informant.

Widmark furiously rips a cord from a lamp, ties Ma Rizzo her into her wheelchair, and then sends her bouncing down the stairs to her death and into what has to be one of the most frightful and horrifying moments in film history.

While movie critics referred to her as an “old woman,” she was actually in her 40s when she played the scene.

“I like to play parts that are not myself,” she said in an earlier interview with The New York Times. “I’m not the least bit exciting. I’m an ordinary person in an ordinary life, but in my imagination there’s no stopping me.”

Bordman, the theater scholar and co-author of “The Oxford Companion to American Theatre,” wrote that Dunnock was for “years one of the most respected supporting actresses in American theatre despite her mousy looks and plaintive voice.”

Dunnock returned often to Goucher, and in 1991, the college named a two-story teaching theater in the Meyerhoff Arts Center the Mildred Dunnock Theatre.

She was represented by her daughter the actress Linda Mcguire who died earlier this year.

In a 1971 lecture at Goucher, she explained that “live performance can never be replaced by movies, and that sitting at home surrounded by screaming children is “not the same as sitting in a darkened theater, where you can have a certain true experience.”

However, she was realistic, telling students that “theater is a hungry, trying life that no girl should attempt unless she has the passion to do it. You will starve. Your stomach will ache for food. You will break your heart.” 

She lived for years at Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, with her husband of nearly 60 years, Keith Urmy, a New York banker, but in later years became quite reclusive.

She died at 90 in 1991 and was buried in Lambert’s Cove Cemetery in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.