Hollywood knew her as May Robson, and the Grand Old Lady of the Stage, but May was born Mary Jeanette Robison at Moama in 1858.
May’s father died when she was a child, and the family moved from Moama to England when her mother remarried in 1870.
May was schooled in Australia and North London before studying languages in Brussels.
She married her first husband, Charles Leveson Gore, in 1875 in London when she was 18 years old, and he died about 1881.
In order to survive and support her three children, May made crochet hoods and embroidery and taught painting before working in a picture theatre as a translator.
May’s acting career started on September 17, 1883, when she became an actress in Hoop of Gold at the Brooklyn Grand Opera House Stage.
Her stage name ‘Robson’ came from an unfortunate misspelling on the billboard at the venue, which she kept for luck.
Six years after her career began, she met and married her second husband, Augustus Homer Brown, and they would stay together until his death in 1920.
In 1911, May formed her own touring theatre group, and became close to producer Charles Frohman who would propel her success.
May’s career flourished over the years as a character actress and a comedian, and she appeared in two silent movies: How Molly Made Good in 1915, and later A Night Out in 1916.
May went to Hollywood in 1927 when she was 69, and starred in The She-Wolf as an old woman in 1931.
She famously played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland in 1933, and became known for her role as Aunt Elizabeth in Bringing Up Baby alongside Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Countess Vronsky in Anna Karenina and grandmother Lettie Blodgett in the original 1937 A Star Is Born.
She was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Lady for a Day, but ultimately lost out to Katharine Hepburn.
At the time, May was the first Australian-born actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, and she was also, at that time, the oldest woman to be nominated at the age of 75.
May Robson died on October 20, 1942, at 84 years old.
Joan of Paris — her last film — was shot only a few months before her death.
She is buried at Flushing Cemetery, Queens, New York, next to her husband Augustus, resting after 59 years as an actress of the stage, the silent screen, and in the talkies.
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