LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Alison Skipworth
built 186 days ago
Confidence woman Martha Hicks (Alison Skipworth), better known to those who know her at all as "the Countess," is a career criminal who has just been paroled. She would like to slip away from the authorities and leave the country, but first she wants to look in on the only decent, respectable part of her life, the two daughters whom she left behind with her onetime husband, Elmer Hicks (Richard Bennett), a small-town hotel owner. She arrives to find that Elmer, in his well-meaning but dithering way, has let their younger daughter (Gertrude Messinger) fall in with the wrong crowd, including a two-bit criminal, Jack Houston (George Raft). He has filled her head with stories about what a big man he is and plans to take her to Chicago with him, until Martha intervenes -- she manages to turn the interest of veteran lawman John Adams (J. Farrell MacDonald) to her advantage and nearly gets Houston thrown in the slammer. When he proves tougher to get out of the way than she'd thought he'd be, Martha has to choose between freedom or the well-being of her daughter, and gets some unexpected help from Elmer.
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Confidence woman Martha Hicks (Alison Skipworth), better known to those who know her at all as "the Countess," is a career criminal who has just been paroled. She would like to slip away from the authorities and leave the country, but first she wants to look in on the only decent, respectable part of her life, the two daughters whom she left behind with her onetime husband, Elmer Hicks (Richard Bennett), a small-town hotel owner.
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From All Movie Guide: Formidable British comic actress Alison Skipworth became an actress in her early twenties to help support her starving-artist husband. A classic beauty in her youth, Ms. Skipworth served as decoration in such London stage productions as The Gaiety Girl and An Artist's Model. Her acting improved with each performance, and by 1908 she was co-starring with James K. Hackett in the prestige production The Prisoner of Zenda. She made her film debut in 1920, re-creating her long-running stage role in 39 East. Preferring the stage to films during the silent era, Skipworth did not become a full-time movie actress until 1930, when establishing herself as one of Hollywood's most reliable character actresses. Exuding aristocratic hauteur from every pore, Skipworth was an excellent foil for Mae West in Night After Night (1932) and for W.C.
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British character actress Alison Skipworth steals her few scenes as the elderly Madame Barabbas, the grandmotherly criminal mastermind with the looks of a sweet old lady and the instincts of a born killer. Arthur Treacher is marvelously droll as an English gentleman crook, apologetic & polite, seeking the ram's horn.
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Alison Mary Elliott Margaret Markham-Skipworth, 57, is Hollywood's most reliable grande dame or "high class wicked woman." At 20 she was the wife of artist Frank Markham-Skipworth and starving in London. "To keep from starving" she took a part as understudy to Marie Tempest in The Artist's Model, nine months later was playing the lead in Manhattan. She once paid Douglas Fairbanks Sr. $40 a week as a juvenile. She has owned a chicken farm on Long Island for 28 years, will some day retire to it.
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Skipworth made her first stage appearance at Daly's Theater in London in 1894, in A Gaiety Girl. Her first American performance came the following year at the Broadway Theater in New York City. She sang in light opera in The Artist's Model. In this production she served as understudy to Marie Tempest. After performing in two London plays, Skipworth returned to the United States, and made it her home. She joined the company of Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum.
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