Mary Clare Absalom was born in 1892. She trained at a dramatic school and began her career on the London stage at the age of 18 in 1910. She appeared in the film The Black Spider in 1920, and thereafter divided her time between the stage and the cinema. In September 1936 she played the leading role in the play Laura Garnett, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, at the Arts Theatre Club, London. In the theatre, she played the lead role of the victim in Agatha Christie’s 1945 play Appointment with Death. In films, she was mainly a character actress and in later life often portrayed mature ladies who had strength of character or were autocratic. In April 1927, she appeared in Packing Up, a short film produced in the DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process. The short featured Malcolm Keen and was directed by Miles Mander. In 1938, she was featured opposite Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell in The Citadel. She appeared in two of the British-made Alfred Hitchcock films, Young and Innocent, playing a nightmare of an aunt who demands that everyone enjoy themselves at her young daughter’s birthday party, and The Lady Vanishes, in which she plays a sinister Countess; two vastly different characters. She played the part of Linda Singer in two different versions of The Constant Nymph and had previously been in the stage version. In 1956, she was in several TV episodes in British television. She married Lionel Percival Mawhood (1888–1935) at the District of St Martin, London in September Quarter 1915; they had two children. Following Mawhood’s death in 1935, she never remarried.