page_title: May Robson
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: May Robson / Career
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of May Robson from the film A Star is Born.
context_page_description: Mary Jeanette Robison, known professionally as May Robson, was an Australian-born American-based actress, whose career spanned 58 years, starting in 1883 when she was 25 years of age. A major stage actress of the late 19th and early 20th century, Robson is best known today for the dozens of 1930s motion pictures she appeared in when she was well into her 70s, usually playing cross old women with hearts of gold.
  Robson was the earliest-born person to enjoy a major Hollywood career and receive an Academy Award nomination, which she got for her leading role in Lady for a Day in 1933. She was also the first Australian to be nominated for an Oscar.
context_section_description: On 17 September 1883, she became an actress in Hoop of Gold at the Brooklyn Grand Opera House stage. Her name was incorrectly spelled "Robson" in the billing, which she used from that point forward "for good luck". Over the next several decades, she flourished on the stage as a comedian and character actress. Her success was partly due to her affiliation with powerful manager and producer Charles Frohman and the Theatrical Syndicate. She established her own touring theatrical company by 1911.
  She appeared as herself in a cameo in the 1915 silent film, How Molly Made Good. Robson starred in the 1916 silent film A Night Out, an adaptation of the play she co-wrote, The Three Lights.
  In 1927, Robson went to Hollywood where she had a successful film career as a senior aged woman. Among her starring roles was in The She-Wolf (1931) as a miserly millionaire businesswoman based on the real-life miser Hetty Green.
  She also starred in the final segment of the anthology film If I Had a Million (1932) as a rest home resident who gets a new lease on life when she is given a $1,000,000 check by a dying business tycoon.  She played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1933), Countess Vronsky in Anna Karenina (1935), Aunt Elizabeth in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), and a sharp-tongued Granny in A Star Is Born (1937). Robson was top-billed as late as 1940, starring in Granny Get Your Gun at age 82. Her last film was 1942's Joan of Paris.
caption: May Robson in A Star is Born (1937)
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