Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold (9 December 1897 - 24 May 1987) was an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric persona. Her signature drawling, deep voice was a result of nodes on her vocal cords she developed in the 1920s and early 1930s. After a successful career as a child actress, she later established herself on the stage as an adult, playing in comedy, drama and experimental theatre, and broadcasting on the radio. She found her milieu in revue, which she played from the 1930s to the 1950s, co-starring several times with Hermione Baddeley.

Gingold was born in Carlton Hill, Maida Vale, London, the elder daughter of a prosperous Vienna-born Jewish stockbroker James Gingold and his wife, Kate (nee Walter). Her paternal grandparents were the Ottoman-born British subject, Moritz "Maurice" Gingold, a London stockbroker, and his Austrian-born wife, Hermine, after whom Hermione was named (Gingold mentions in her autobiography that her mother might have got Hermione from the Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale, which she was reading shortly before her birth). On her father's side, she was descended from the celebrated Solomon Sulzer, a famous synagogue cantor and Jewish liturgical composer in Vienna. Her mother was from a "well-to-do Jewish family". James felt that religion was something children needed to decide on for themselves, and Gingold grew up with no particular religious beliefs.  Gingold first appeared on stage in a kindergarten staging of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in the role of Wolsey. Her professional debut was in 1908 when she had just turned eleven. She played the herald in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of Pinkie and the Fairies by W. Graham Robertson, in a cast including Ellen Terry, Frederick Volpe, Marie Lohr and Viola Tree. She was promoted to the leading role of Pinkie for a provincial tour. Tree cast her as Falstaff's page, Robin, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. She attended Rosina Filippi's stage school in London. In 1911 she was cast in the original production of Where the Rainbow Ends which opened to very good reviews on 21 December 1911. Among her colleagues as child-actors in "Where the Rainbow Ends" were Philip Tonge and Noel Coward.  On 10 December 1912, the day after her fifteenth birthday, Gingold played Cassandra in William Poel's production of Troilus and Cressida at the King's Hall, Covent Garden, with Esme Percy as Troilus and Edith Evans as Cressida. The following year she appeared in a musical production, The Marriage Market, in a small role in a cast that included Tom Walls, W H Berry, and Gertie Millar. In 1914 she played Jessica in The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic. In 1918 Gingold married the publisher Michael Joseph, with whom she had two sons, the younger of whom, Stephen, became a pioneer of theatre in the round in Britain.

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