Word: mother
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Father (William Powell) is the archetype of the absolute family monarch of the '80s - a man .disinclined to take any lip even from the Almighty Himself. But there is an innocence about his tyranny which excuses the kind way everybody, including the authors, feels toward him. Mother (Irene Dunne) is a gentle and infinitely guileful soul with great skill at winning victories by passive resistance. There are four sons, each in a different shade of red hair...
William Powell, with the help of a fiery wig, looks right as Father and Irene Dunne seems to understand Mother...
...Mother made a fine 15-stone* corpse. Even in her coffin, she dominated the dingy, chocolate-colored house which Edna, her spinster daughter, would now inherit along with other odds & ends of property and nondescript furnishings. Edna had devoted her life to Mother. Edna was fiftyish. "What a relief for Edna," whispered the family. "She must feel that she's starting life again...
...Snigger from Mother. About an hour before the mutes arrived, Mother's will was read. But Mother, "with her fondness for underdone beef and breezy unpleasantness," was to have the last word. Edna was to inherit on one condition: she must be earning ?5 a week within a month of the funeral. In her whole life, Edna had never earned anything but a snigger from Mother. But as the family smiled, Edna felt a quiet pleasure in her new-found sense of freedom...
Edna asserted her new freedom at once. She insisted on wearing a dashing hat to Mother's burial. It was one of those flower-&-fruit affairs trimmed with poppies and cherries...