It is quite unusual that Elizabeth Jones (1875-1952) did not acquire her nickname ironically; she actually was diminutive.
Jones was a Welsh actor who travelled to the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. She made her first screen appearance for John Ford, in The Iron Horse (1924), and he also directed her last film, The Quiet Man (1952). In between, she was in six other Ford pictures, including as one of the few genuine Welsh performers in How Green Was My Valley (1942).
Jones worked regularly, always without credit, for some of Hollywood’s other great directors: Erich von Stroheim, including in Greed (1924); Frank Capra in Lady for a Day (1934); William A Wellman, as a resident of Warsaw, Vermont who sneers at Frederic March in Nothing Sacred (1937).
She was in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942), and worked twice for Orson Welles, in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Macbeth (1948). She was also in two of Joseph Losey’s early pictures, M and The Prowler (both 1951).
Tiny Jones made around 140 appearances, but only one in an MGM musical, as one of the stage mothers in Stage Mother.
