Bodil Rosing

Bodil Rosing (born Bodil Hammerich; December 27, 1877 – December 31, 1941) was a Danish-American film actress in the silent and sound eras.

Life and Career

Bodil Hammerich was born as the daughter of a music dean and his wife, a well-known pianist. She studied acting at the Royal Danish Theatre in the 1890s. She worked afterwards as a stage actress in Denmark. She married a Norwegian doctor, Einer Jansen, in 1898; the couple had four children. They divorced in 1919. During the early 1920s, she made one or two stage appearances on Broadway while she raised four children in the meantime. She was retired from acting when she came to Hollywood in 1924, where her daughter married actor Monte Blue. There she was suddenly chosen to play a film role in Pretty Ladies (1925).

Rosing was under studio contract at MGM and often played matronly roles like servants, housekeepers, cooks or mothers. Her most notable role was perhaps Janet Gaynor's "Old Maid" in F.W. Murnau's silent masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). With the advent of sound film, she mostly portrayed foreigners and proved herself as an extremely versatile actress in a variety of ethnicities in about 85 films until her death. She appeared as the wife of her Danish compatriot in The Painted Veil with Greta Garbo and also played the German neighbour of Lionel Barrymore in You Can't Take It With You by Frank Capra.