Laura Hope Crews

Laura Hope Crews was a character actress of movies and stage. She was the daughter of a stage actress, Angelena Lockwood and a backstage carpenter, John Thomas Crews. She had three older siblings. Crews started acting at age four. Her first stage appearance was at Woodward’s Garden. She stopped acting to finish school and then returned to acting in 1898. Her best-known film role was Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind.

Other screen credits include Camille, The Sisters, Idiot’s Delight, The Rains Came, and The Blue Bird.

She appeared in plays written by A.A. Milne, who was particularly impressed by her work in his Mr. Pim Passes By. The play was a big success and ran for 232 performances. Afterwards, she began to work in productions staged by the New York Theater Guild, which had just opened.

Crews’s final stage appearance came in 1942, in the original Broadway run of Arsenic and Old Lace in which she replaced one of the original cast members. She stayed with the production for more than a year and a half on Broadway and in a touring company before she was forced to leave because of illness.