by Jason Adams
What better time than now, what with the latest iteration of The Invisible Man hitting movie theaters this week, to celebrate one of the cinema's greatest character actresses -- I speak of ye Irish spitfire Una O'Connor, who was once described as having "the body of a scarecrow, the contemptuous stare of a house detective, and the voice of an air-raid siren." Said with affection, no doubt.
She certainly brought all of those awesome qualities to bear on James Whale's 1933 adaptation of The Invisible Man, which had her playing the mistress of the pub that the villain-scientist Claude Rains rents an upstairs room from...
Having only been in film for four years at that point (she had a long career on the stage) O'Connor had already settled indelibly into her "type," which was the comic relief maid, or nurse, or nursemaid even. She'd done the latter in London for Hitchcock in 1930 with Murder! and she continued the grand tradition across the pond for Hollywood.
O'Connor went on to have a very long career playing variations on these roles -- she made a fine funny sidekick to Olivia DeHavilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, and 20 years after that brought some much needed humor to the courtroom of Billy Wilder's Witness For the Prosecution -- but it's her two films in the Universal Monsters canon along with director James Whale (who knew a camp icon when he saw one) that have solidified her beloved place in horror fans's hearts.
Besides the shrieking barmaid in The Invisible Man she played, well, a shrieking townsperson in The Bride of Frankenstein just two years later -- alongside the great Ernest Thesiger and Elsa Lanchester (oh to have gotten to hang out on the set of the Bride) O'Connor instinctively got the precise bridge between fright and comedy that Whale was gunning for. A laugh melds into a shriek and vice versa -- there's a reason these movies are still talked about nigh on one hundred years later. They're just an absolute joy to watch, and characters like Una, with her air-raid siren of a self, are a big part of it.