Anne Seymour (actress)

Anne Seymour (née Anne Seymour Eckert; born September 11, 1909 in Manhattan, NYC – December 8, 1988 in Los Angeles, California) was an American film and television character actress.

Born in Manhattan to William Stanley and May (née Davenport) Eckert, Seymour was the seventh generation of a theatrical family traceable to 18th century Ireland.

Seymour, her mother (May Davenport Seymour), and her brother (Bill Seymour) were all active in radio concurrently. Her great-uncle was character actor Harry Davenport, and her cousins were writer James Seymour and actor John Seymour.

After attending St. Mary's for "her conventional education," Seymour studied at the American Laboratory Theatre.

Seymour never married, and had no children. She died at age 79 in Los Angeles, and is interred in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.

Stage

Seymour's first professional activity as an entertainer came with the Jitney Players, for which she earned $15 per week.

She was in four Broadway productions. She played in At the Bottom and Puppet Show, both in 1930, and in The School for Scandal in 1931. Almost three decades later, she played Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello.

Radio

Seymour debuted on radio in Cincinnati in 1932. In the early 1940s, she played Prudence Dane, the leading female role in the "historic serial" A Woman of America and starred as Mary Marlin in The Story of Mary Marlin, both on NBC. She also was a member of the casts of Joyce Jordan, Girl Interne, Tom Bradley, Against the Storm, and King Arthur, Junior.

Television

Seymour's first venture in television was a three-month role in Follow Your Heart, an NBC soap opera. "I hated every minute of it," she said. She also "had a running part on a CBS soap operal called The First Hundred Years." She later starred in Empire, a 1962-63 series set in the modern American West. Turning her talents to comedy, she was a regular in The Tim Conway Show in 1970.

She was a guest star on many American television series in the 1960s and 1970s. She appeared in two episodes of Perry Mason; in 1963 she played Hettie Randall in "The Case of the Festive Felon", and in 1964 she played Bonnie Mae Wilmet in "The Case of the Bullied Bowler". She portrayed Amelia Tarbell in Pollyanna (1960), Esther in the episode "Final Escape" of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985), and Miss Tilford in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In a 1965 episode of Hazel entitled "A 'Lot' to Remember," she played Laura Kirkland. She played Ms. Frost in "A Visit to Upright", a 1972 episode of Bonanza, as well as three different characters in four episodes of Gunsmoke: "Snow Train Parts 1 & 2", "The Wake", and "Kitty's Injury". In the spring of 1970, she was a regular cast member of the situation comedy The Tim Conway Show, playing airport and airline owner Mrs. K. J. Crawford during the show's 12-episode run. She was also a guest star in the episode "Involvement" of Emergency! that first aired on January 24, 1976 (Season 5, Episode 19), in which she played Former Head Nurse Mille Eastman.

Film

An early film appearance by Seymour was in the 1949 film All the King's Men as Mrs. Lucy Stark. She played the role of Grandma Beebe in the 1961 children's film classic Misty, a screen adaptation of Marguerite Henry's children's book, Misty of Chincoteague. Her last performance was in 1988, in the feature film Field of Dreams, which was released after her death.