Sara Haden spent three decades as the woman nobody wanted to see coming: the aunt, the matron, the truant officer. She was good at it, and nobody asked for anything else. Aunt Milly in the Andy Hardy films is the part to know her by.
Fi1m perspective
She arrives, and somebody's afternoon is over. From the mid-1930s Sara Haden was the truant officer, the matron, the spinster aunt, the schoolteacher with her mouth set, and most often the figure a child in the film would rather had not noticed them. Captain January (1936) has her as Agatha Morgan, a truant officer, and it fixed the image for a generation of children in the stalls. She knew exactly what she was selling. "I'm always mean but there is no monotony about my meanness. I am mean in a great variety of fashions."
The career ran the way character careers did. Stage work from the early 1920s with Walter Hampden's troupe and on Broadway, then a film debut in 1934 repeating a stage part in Spitfire. From 1938 to 1946 she was under contract at MGM and turned up wherever the studio needed a stern woman at the edge of a scene, including a matron in Woman of the Year (1942). The job that lasted was Aunt Milly Forrest, which she played in fourteen of the sixteen Andy Hardy films between 1937 and 1958, opposite Mickey Rooney and often for George B. Seitz. Her last film, Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958), was that part again, and she carried on in supporting roles and television until about 1965.
Her two best films, by our lights, are the ones in which she is hardest to find. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is a film we rate highly, and she is in it as Flora; The Bishop's Wife (1947) is a gentler evening and she is Mildred Cassaway. Our reviews of both mention neither part, and that is not a slight. Lubitsch and Koster wanted casts that moved as one, and she could be relied on to be exactly where the scene needed her and nowhere else. We will admit that on going back to The Shop Around the Corner for this piece we had to look for her, and were a little put out that a woman who held her corner through fourteen Andy Hardys could disappear so completely into a Budapest shop. That is a compliment to Lubitsch's company and a fair picture of the career.
The complaint, then and since, is that the type was all there was. Cast for her face from 1934 onwards, she was handed the same woman for thirty years, and the career summaries remember the crabbiness rather than anything under it. The part people reach for when they want to argue otherwise is Martha Winthrop in She-Wolf of London (1946), where the sternness is pointed at something nastier; we have not reviewed it and will not pretend to more than that. She once said she was glad her dog did not go to the pictures, in case he thought less of her. Fourteen films suggest the Hardys, at least, did not.
Biography
Sara Haden (born Catherine Haden) was an American character actress. She appeared on stage from the early 1920s, with a Broadway debut in Trigger (1927), before making her film debut in 1934. She worked in Hollywood films through the 1950s and on television into the mid-1960s.
She is known for playing Aunt Milly Forrest in thirteen entries in MGM's Andy Hardy film series. Other film roles include Miss Harrington in The White Parade (1934), Flora in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Matron in Woman of the Year (1942), and Mildred Cassaway in The Bishop's Wife (1947). She also appeared in episodes of Perry Mason and Dr. Kildare.
Haden was married to actor Richard Abbott from 1921 until their divorce in 1948. She died on 15 September 1981.
