Alfred Hitchcock Presents - "Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty"

Mildred Natwick (Actor) .. Millicent Bracegirdle

Born: June 19, 1905
Died: October 25, 1994
Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland

Trivia: Fresh out of Bryn Mawr college, American actress Mildred Natwick started the road to stage success in amateur shows in her native Baltimore. By 1932 Natwick was on Broadway in Carrie Nation; establishing what would become her standard operating procedure, the actress played a character much older than herself. In 1940, Natwick was introduced to movie audiences as the cockney "lady of the evening" in John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940) -- the first of several assignments for Ford, which included Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1948) and The Quiet Man (1952). Seldom starring in a film role, Natwick nonetheless made the most of what she was given, as in her one-scene part as an advocate of birth control who inadvertently pitches her program to the parents of 12 children in Cheaper By the Dozen (1950). And it was Natwick who, as skulking sorceress Grizelda in Danny Kaye's The Court Jester (1956), inaugurates the side-splitting "The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle" routine. A frequent visitor to TV, Natwick briefly settled down on the tube in the mystery series "The Snoop Sisters," which costarred Helen Hayes. In films until 1988, Natwick was honored with a long-overdue Oscar nomination for her work as Jane Fonda's martyr mama in 1967's Barefoot in the Park.

Gavin Muir (Actor) .. Bracegirdle

Born: September 08, 1907
Died: March 24, 1972

Trivia: Though he frequently adopted a British accent, actor Gavin Muir was a Chicago boy. After stage work, Muir went to Hollywood for Mary of Scotland (1936), then spent the next quarter century menacing various stars as sly, slow-speaking villains. His indeterminate nationality made him useful in war films like The Master Race (1945), while his tendency to look as though he was hiding some awful secret enabled him to shine in such melodramas as Nightmare (1942). A more benign but still not altogether above-board Muir appeared in the role of a scientist coerced into inflicting invisibility upon Arthur Franz in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). As late as 1959, Muir was throwing roadblocks in the way of sweetness 'n' light as a snooty butler on TV's The Betty Hutton Show. Gavin Muir's last film before slipping into retirement was Night Tide (1963), an appropriately glum ghost story.

Tita Purdom (Actor) .. Miss Lovejoy

Albert Carrier (Actor) .. Garcon

Born: October 16, 1919

Trivia: Supporting actor Albert Carrier was born in Italy. He made his film debut in Mexico where he appeared in five films. He went on to work in numerous Hollywood films during the '50s and '60s where he usually portrayed Frenchmen. He later went on to make over sixty guest appearances on television.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty

01:35 am - 02:05 am, Thursday, May 7 on WJLP MeTV (33.1)

Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty

Season 3, Episode 18