Kathleen Howard (July 27, 1884 – April 15, 1956) was a Canadian-born American opera singer magazine editor and character actress from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. She spent her childhood in Buffalo, New York and is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery there.  After early vocal training in Buffalo, New York, she studied in Berlin, then in Paris at the school of the great Polish tenor Jean de Reszke, before making her 1907 operatic bow at Metz as Azucena in Verd’s “Il Trovatore”. She created the role of Zita in Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918. She was also memorable as Amelia, the nagging, shrewish wife of W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934). As Kathleen’s voice began to fade, she switched to acting, specializing in comedic character roles in several dozen Hollywood features. She made her silver screen debut with the 1934 “Death Takes a Holiday”; probably her best known turns were two as W C Fields’ nagging wife in 1934’s “It’s a Gift” and the in 1935 “Man on the Flying Trapeze”. She left the screen with the 1950 “Born to Be Bad”, and was for a time the fashion editor of “Harper’s Bazaar”.  Kathleen Howard was part of the repertory system in the opera houses of Metz and Darmstadt previous to World War I. She told of her life as an opera singer in an autobiography, Confessions of an Opera Singer (Knopf 1918). Kathleen Howard died on April 15, 1956, aged 71, of undisclosed causes, in Hollywood, California.