Laura Hope Crews

Crews was the daughter of stage actress Angelena Lockwood and backstage carpenter John Thomas Crews. She had three older siblings. Crews started acting at age four. Her first stage appearance was at Woodward's Gardens. She stopped acting to finish school and then returned to acting in 1898. As she was a native San Franciscan, the records pertaining to her early life were destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906. Most of Crews' formal education came in San Jose, as the family had moved there following the remarriage of Crews' mother. ==Career==

In 1898, Crews performed in San Francisco as an ingenue with the Alcazar Stock Company. Two years later, she and her mother moved to New York City, where Crews began to act with the Henry V. Donnelly Stock Company. The play was a big success and ran for 232 performances on Broadway. In 1924 she starred in The Werewolf for a run of 112 Broadway performances. Crews also starred as Judith Bliss in the original Broadway production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever (1925), which she co-directed Her final stage appearance came in 1942, in the original Broadway run of Arsenic and Old Lace in which she replaced one of the original cast members. She stayed with the production for more than a year and a half on Broadway and in a touring company before she was forced to leave because of illness. ==Death==

Crews died in the LeRoy Sanitarium in New York City in 1942, following an illness of four months. Some sources say that the illness in which she suffered from was kidney failure. She was laid to rest at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. Crews has a star at 6251 Hollywood Boulevard on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Crews was also the first credited cast member of Gone with the Wind to die. ==Filmography==

produced by Jesse Lasky ==References==