LONDON (AP) - American-born actress Constance Cummings, a Hollywood star of the early 1930s who then became one of the leading figures on the British stage, has died. She was 95.
Cummings died Nov. 23, according to obituaries published in London. The cause of death was not announced.
Born in Seattle, Cummings was only in her early 20s when she became a leading actress in Hollywood, where her intelligence, charming manner and tumbling golden curls made her a favorite.
In just two years, she made more than a dozen films, working for such top directors as Howard Hawks in the 1931 prison drama "The Criminal Code," and Frank Capra in his 1932 Depression drama, "American Madness."
She also was in the 1932 Harold Lloyd comedy "Movie Crazy," and "Broadway Through a Keyhole," a 1933 nightclub drama that was cowritten by columnist Walter Winchell and featured singers Russ Columbo and Blossom Seeley.
While in Hollywood, she met her future husband, the British playwright Benn Levy.
They married in 1933, and it was under his guidance that she developed into a fine stage actress, initially in comic roles in her husband's plays and adaptations, then increasingly in more serious portrayals, including "Long Day's Journey Into Night" opposite Laurence Olivier.
In 1938, she played Katherine, the woman who wins the schoolmaster's heart in "Goodbye Mr. Chips," and the critic James Agate wrote that she had "some of the fragrance and pathos, sensitiveness and radiance of the great actresses of our youth."
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