Helen Westley (March 28, 1875 blank">http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0922818/ - December 12, 1942) was an _American character actress. She was one of the members on the original board of the Theatre Guild, and appeared in many of their productions, among them Peer Gynt, and some of their productions of plays by George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion, Caesar and Cleopatra, Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, and The Apple Cart. She appeared in the original Broadway productions of two plays which, after her death, would be turned into classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals; they were Green Grow The Lilacs, which became Oklahoma!, and Liliom, which became Carousel. Westley played Aunt Eller in the former, and Mrs. Muskat (who became Mrs. Mullin in Carousel) in the latter. She also appeared in the original Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's marathon play, Strange Interlude.

Westley played roles, both comic and dramatic, in many films. They included Death Takes a Holiday, All This and Heaven Too, four films opposite child star Shirley Temple (including the 1937 Heidi), the 1934 surprise hit Anne of Green Gables, the 1935 film version of Roberta, and the 1936 film version of Show Boat, in which she replaced Edna May Oliver, when Ms. Oliver declined to repeat her stage role as Parthy Ann Hawks.

By a curious coincidence, both Ms. Westley and Ms. Oliver died in the same year - 1942.

Although she could on a rare occasion display a bit of kindness, or at least some kind of grouchy benevolence, Helen Westley had few peers on stage or film when it came to outright unpleasantness. A stern, indomitable presence, her characters offered unsolicited advice to anyone and everyone within arm's reach. They could literally freeze a person in his or her own tracks with a mere hawk-like glare or arm-folding stance. They could be overbearing, greedy, spiteful, contentious, meddlesome, controlling, narrow-minded, viper-tongued, or all of the above. In essence, she was often major pain in the posterior to the film's star. It usually took a young, brave, gentle soul along the lines of a Shirley Temple or Anne Shirley to find a way to thaw out the icy cold heart that barely beat within. The Brooklyn-born Helen was born on March 28, 1875 and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began on the stage at age 18 in a one-act comedy skit entitled "The Captain of the Nonesuch." Reaching stardom just before the dawn of the twentieth century, she co-founded both the Greenwich Square Players and the Washington Square Players, the latter growing into the Theatre Guild of which she became one of six managing directors. A steadfast player under the Broadway lights, she appeared in such classics as Chekhov's "The Seagull" (as Madame Arkadina) (1916), "Heartbreak House" (1920), "Liliom" (1921), "Peer Gynt" (1923), "The Adding Machine" (1923), "The Guardsman" (1924), "Caesar and Cleopatra" (1925), "The Doctor's Dilemma" (1927), "Strange Interlude" (1928), "Faust" (1928), "The Apple Cart" (1930), "Green Grow the Lilacs" (1931) and "They Shall Not Die" (1934), to name just a few. By age 60, she had discovered and settled into filming, and for the next (almost) decade, spread misery in movie after movie. Her dour dowagers, no-nonsense matrons and acidulous relatives took the form of Granny Mingott in Age of Innocence, The (1934); the designer title character in Roberta (1935); the manipulative and malicious mother of Joel McCrea in Splendor (1935); the harridan-like Parthy Hawkes in the Irene Dunne/Allan Jones (I) version of Show Boat (1936); and the cackling, pipe-smoking grandmaw in Banjo on My Knee (1936). Her finger-wagging authority figures showed up to intimidate Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables (1934) and courageous little Shirley Temple who somehow managed to reveal her human side in four films: Dimples (1936), Stowaway (1936), Heidi (1937), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). Helen remained a vital character presence on the large screen up until her death at age 67 in 1942. She married John Westley in 1900 but they parted ways 12 years later. She had one daughter.