Cornelia Otis Skinner was an American actress, playwright, writer, biographer, and screenwriter born in Chicago on May 30, 1899.

Skinner was educated at Bryn Mawr College before pursuing careers that spanned the stage, screen, and the written page. She worked as both a stage actor and a film actor, demonstrating a range that carried across different performance formats. Alongside her acting work, she produced writing in multiple forms, including plays, screenplays, and biography, establishing herself as a versatile figure in American cultural life. Her notable work includes Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, a title that brought her writing to wider public attention. She remained a citizen of the United States throughout her life, working primarily in the English language across all her professional endeavors.

Skinner died in New York City on July 9, 1979, having built a body of work that moved across performance and prose with equal facility. Her career reflected a sustained engagement with both theatrical and literary forms, and her output as a biographer, playwright, and memoirist represented the breadth of her professional commitments. The work she produced across these overlapping roles — stage performance, film acting, playwriting, screenwriting, and biography — defines the contours of a career that resisted easy categorization within any single discipline.