Sara Haden

Sara Haden (November 17, 1899 – September 15, 1981) was a character actress in Hollywood films of the 1930s through the 1950s.

Early life

She was born Katherine W. Haden on November 17, 1899, in Galveston, Texas. (Axel Nissen's Accustomed to Her Face: Thirty-Five Character Actresses of Golden Age Hollywood has her first name spelled Catherine.) Haden was the daughter of Dr. John Brannum Haden (1871-1910) and character actress, Charlotte Walker, one of the great stage beauties at the turn of the century, who was later active in silent films and early talkies. An attractive woman, Haden however lacked the beauty of her mother, as she early on had the appeal of a lonely school marm and thus was always cast in character roles. After her parent's divorce, Haden and her sister, Beatrice Shelton Haden (born 1897), attended the Sacred Heart Academy in Galveston, where they boarded during school terms.

Career

Haden first appeared on the stage in the early 1920s.

She made her film debut in 1934 (one year after her mother's retirement) in the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Spitfire. Haden later became a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the late 1930s and had smallish roles in many of the studio's films, most notably in the Andy Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney, cast as the spinsterish Aunt Milly Forrest.

Haden made her last film in 1958 but was active on television up until a 1965 guest spot on Dr. Kildare. She was most notable for her stern, humorless characterisations such as a truant officer in Shirley Temple's Captain January (1936), but she also played the much-loved teacher Miss Pipps who is unjustly fired in the Our Gang comedy Come Back, Miss Pipps (1941).

Her other films include Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), and The Bishop's Wife (1947). Her television appearances include episodes of Climax!, Bourbon Street Beat, and Bonanza. She also had a guest appearance on Perry Mason as Florence Harvey in the 1959 episode, "The Case of the Romantic Rogue."

Personal life and death

She was married to film actor Richard Abbott, born Seamon Vandenberg, (1899-1986) from 1921 to 1948. Haden died on September 15, 1981, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.

Selected filmography

• Reunion (1936)
• The Crime of Dr. Forbes (1936)
• Under Cover of Night (1937)
• Out West with the Hardys (1938)
• Judge Hardy and Son (1939)
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940) as Flora Kaczek
• Boom Town (1940) as Miss Barnes
• The Bishop's Wife (1947) as Mildred Cassaway
• Roughshod (1949)
• Rodeo (1952)