Wycherly, Margaret

(1881-1956)

   Born Margaret De Wolfe in London, she was raised in Boston and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before taking the name Margaret Wycherly in her acting debut in 1898 opposite Fanny Janauschek in What Dreams May Come. She acted with Jessie Bonstelle's stock company and produced and acted in the first American productions of new plays by William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. Wycherly appeared in several plays by her husband, Bayard Veiller, notably The Thirteenth Chair (1916), in which she played a medium who solves a murder. After 1920, Wycherly gave highly praised performances in Broadway, Provincetown Players, and Theatre Guild productions of numerous important plays, including Jane Clegg (1920), The Verge (1921), Back to Methuselah (1922), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), The Adding Machine (1923), and Rosmersholm (1925). After 1930, Wycherly's notable successes were in Another Language* (1932), Tobacco Road* (1933), and she replaced Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie* in 1945. Wycherly directed several productions and appeared in numerous motion pictures as a character actress, notably in White Heat (1950) as the murderous "Ma" to James Cagney's psychopathic gangster.