Aging Broadway matriarch Sarah Crabtree is broke and depressed. When she learns that a dear friend, highly successful British actress Lady Henrietta Scorsby, has disappeared, she takes on her final and greatest role. Traveling to England, she presents herself at the Scorsby estate as their long-lost thespian aunt, where she is welcomed back by the family to live out her remaining days in grand fashion. She soon comes to realize all is not as it seems on the surface. Patriarch John's business is at the point of bankruptcy. His wife Katherine's spending is driving him deeper into debt while she conducts an affair with a family friend. "Aunt Henrietta" wields her reputation like a hammer as she intervenes in all family business and feverishly attempts to set things right in the short time she has remaining on this earth.
Descended from the great American composer Stephen Foster, Henrietta Crosman was a star on Broadway in the late 1890s, widely praised for her Shakespearean roles. Although she appeared in several silent films, the coming of sound saw her deliver her most renowned performances in The Royal Family Of Broadway (1930), John Ford's Pilgrimage (1933) and The Curtain Falls (1934) in which she is supported by a sultry Natalie Moorhead as the cheating wife.