Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold (; 9 December 189724 May 1987) was an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric character. Her signature drawling, deep voice was a result of nodules on her vocal cords she developed in the 1920s and early 1930s. After a successful career as a child actress, she established herself on the stage as an adult, playing in comedy, drama and experimental theatre, and radio broadcasting. She found her milieu in revue, which she played from the 1930s to the 1950s, co-starring several times with the English actress Hermione Baddeley. Later she played formidable elderly characters in such films and stage musicals as Gigi (1958), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), The Music Man (1962) and A Little Night Music (1973). From the early 1950s Gingold lived and made her career mostly in the U.S. Her American stage work ranged from John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1953) to Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1963), the latter of which she also played in London. She became a well known guest on television talk shows. She made further appearances in revue and toured in plays and musicals until an accident ended her performing career in 1977. Biography Early years Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold was born in Carlton Hill, Maida Vale, London, the elder daughter of a prosperous Austrian-born Jewish stockbroker, James Gingold, and his wife, Kate Frances (née Walter). Her paternal grandparents were the Ottoman-born British subject, Moritz "Maurice" Gingold, a London stockbroker, and his Austrian-born wife, Hermine, after whom Hermione was named (Gingold mentions in her autobiography that her mother might have got 'Hermione' from Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale, which she was reading shortly before her birth). On her father's side, she was descended from Solomon Sulzer, a synagogue cantor and Jewish liturgical composer in Vienna. James felt that religion was something children needed to decide on for themselves, and Gingold grew up with no particular religious beliefs. Gingold's professional début was in 1908 when she had just turned 11. She played the herald in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of Pinkie and the Fairies by W. Graham Robertson, in a cast including Ellen Terry, Frederick Volpe, Marie Löhr and Viola Tree. She was promoted to the leading role of Pinkie for a provincial tour. Tree cast her as Falstaff's page, Robin, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. She attended Rosina Filippi's