Watson began her career on the stage debuting on Broadway in the play Hearts Aflame in 1902. Her next play was The Girl With Green Eyes, the first of several Clyde Fitch stories. At the end of 1903, Watson appeared in Fitch's Glad of It. This play featured several young performers including Watson who would move on to major Broadway or motion picture prominence: Robert Warwick, John Barrymore, Thomas Meighan, and Grant Mitchell, to say the least. For the rest of the decade, she appeared in several more Fitch stories into the 1910s. Fitch would die in 1909.
Watson's first name, Lucile, is often misspelled in her movie credits as Lucille. Sometime in the 1910s, she was briefly married to silent film star Rockliffe Fellowes; they had no children. Her second husband was Playwright Louis E. Shipman, whom she married in 1928; he died five years later, in 1933.
Watson's first film role was in the 1916 silent film The Girl with Green Eyes, a film version of the Clyde Fitch play she had performed in on Broadway in 1902. She did not appear in another movie until 1930, when she had an uncredited role in The Royal Family of Broadway. In 1939, she played a memorable role as Norma Shearer's wise mother in the cultural comedy/drama from the Clare Booth Luce play, The Women, which has become a classic.
Watson reached the height of her adult acting career in Playwright Lillian Hellman's anti-fascist dramatic stage play Watch on the Rhine on Broadway in 1941, starring Paul Lukas. Two years later in Hollywood, she and Lukas reprised their roles in the film adaptation. In perhaps her best known film role, Lucile Watson's performance as Fanny Farrelly was also acknowledged with a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but she lost to Greek-born Actress Katina Paxinou for her performance as Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Lucile Watson played Aunt March in the 1949 film version of Little Women, whose stars included Elizabeth Taylor as Amy.
Watson died on June 25, 1962, after suffering a heart attack at age 83. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
