Jane Darwell (October 15, 1879 – August 13, 1967) was an Academy Award-winning American theater and film actress.
Darwell was born Patti Woodard in Palmyra, Missouri. She originally intended to become a circus performer, however her family objected and she compromised by becoming an actress.
She began her acting career in theater productions in Chicago and made her first film appearance in 1913. She appeared in almost twenty films over the next two years before returning to the stage. After a 15 year absence from films, she resumed her film career in 1930 with a role in Tom Sawyer, and her career as a Hollywood character actress began. Short, stout and plain faced she was quickly cast in a succession of films usually as the mother of one of the major characters. One of the most popular films she was in was Mary Poppins. She played the bird woman.
She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as "Ma Joad" in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a role she was given at the insistence of the film's star, Henry Fonda. A contract player with 20th Century Fox, Darwell occasionally starred in "B" movies and played featured parts in scores of major films.
By the end of her career she had appeared in more than 170 films, including Huckleberry Finn (1931), Roman Scandals (1933), Once to Every Woman (1934), Little Miss Broadway (1938), Jesse James, The Rains Came, Gone with the Wind (all 1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946), Three Godfathers (1948) and Caged (1950).
Always popular within the film industry, her final role as the old woman feeding the birds in Mary Poppins was personally given to her by Walt Disney.
Darwell has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures, at 6735 Hollywood Boulevard.
Darwell died from a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 87, and was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
She currently has family living in Long Island, New York.
Missouri-born Jane Darwell was the daughter of a railroad president and grew up on a ranch in Missouri. She nursed ambitions to be an opera singer, but put it off because of her father's disapproval (she eventually changed her name to Darwell from the family name of Woodward so as not to "sully" the family name). Making her stage debut at age 33, she was almost 40 when she made her first film, a silent, in 1913. She easily made the transition from silents to talkies, and specialized in playing kindly, grandmotherly types. Her most famous role was as Ma Joad, the glue that held the Joad family together, in the classic Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), for which she won the Academy Award. She was, however, memorably cast against type in Ox-Bow Incident, The (1943), as the shrewish, cackling Ma Grier, one of the leaders of the lynch mob, and again in Caged (1950), as the prison matron in charge of the isolation ward. She made over 200 films. Her last, Mary Poppins (1964), was made at the express request of Walt Disney; she had retired and was living at the Motion Picture Country Home and Disney came out personally to ask her to appear in the film, after which she went back into retirement. She died in 1967 of a heart attack.
