Ethel Griffies

All posts tagged Ethel Griffies

Strange and Unusual: Ethel Griffies in Castle in the Dark

Published December 6, 2025 by biggayhorrorfan

As Madame Saturnia in the murder-mystery Castle in the Desert, the distinguished Ethel Griffies definitely steals the show. The last Charlie Chan film produced by 20th Century Fox Studios, this adventure finds Chan (then Sidney Toler) investigating a poisoning at the titular establishment. Beckoned there by a note that no one claims to have written, Chan is soon joined by his overeager son (Sen Yung) and Saturnia.

While Griffies, as previously reported here, has such projects as The Birds and Stranger on the Third Floor on her resume, Saturnia is probably her most horror-ready role. In commune with the supernatural elements, she spends the majority of the picture popping around a ruinous basement facility. Seemingly completely off kilter, she actually accurately predicts what is about to happen as every shady plot twist comes to life. 

Giving fully into the wily witchery of the role, the actress is a perfect foil for Toler and one wishes that these two characters had been brought together more often.

Nicely, while Griffies had often played up the archness of her persona in other projects, here she is all heroine – although a perfectly strange and completely unusual one.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Hopelessly Devoted to: Ethel Griffies

Published April 27, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

At the time of her death at the age of 97 in 1975, Ethel Griffies was deemed the oldest working actress alive. “When I was a girl,” she is stated as saying, “acting was considered a thoroughly disrespectful profession. We were thought of as vagabonds and rogues.” To wit, during her illustrious career, Griffies, perhaps best known to horror fans as the elderly ornithologist Mrs. Bundy in The Birds, definitely played her share of scrubby common folk.

But she was equally skilled at portraying the impervious and the disdainful. One of her archest celluloid adventures was in the pulpy 1933 Carole Lombard starrer White Woman. There as the regally cruel Mrs. Chisholm she causes much misery for Lombard’s put upon lounge performer. With a proud and dismissive energy, Griffies gives Chisholm enough attitude that Lombard’s character soon flees town in the arms of the grotesquely odd Horace Prin, essayed with gleeful mania by Charles Laughton. A harsher sentence for any fictional damsel is hard to imagine.


Nicely, Griffies’ credits also include such genre offerings as the classic Werewolf in London and 1940’s Stranger on the Third Floor with the always indescribable Peter Lorre, proving she maintained a career that is always worthy of rediscovery for interested cinephiles everywhere.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

http://www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan