Diana Bourbon

Diana Bourbon, born Ruth Hunt on August 28, 1900, in New York City, was an American actress, journalist, producer, director, and writer who worked across stage, radio, film, and television. She died on March 19, 1978, in Los Angeles, at the age of 77. Her father, John Wesley Hunt, was a newspaper editor, and her mother was Mary Ellen Hunt. As a young woman, she studied ballet, received part of her education in Paris and at Oxford University, and during World War I drove an ambulance and worked in a canteen.

Bourbon began her professional life as a stage actress. Her single Broadway credit was a role in the original cast of John Galsworthy's Loyalties, which ran from 1922 to 1923. She also appeared in London in 1923 in Edith Millbank's Tancred, and later returned to the stage in Los Angeles in Music in the Distance in 1960.

Concurrent with her early stage work, Bourbon contributed articles to The New York Times from 1922 to 1927, writing primarily on cultural subjects while based in London and Paris. Her journalism during this period included a 1924 interview with Emma Goldman in exile, a 1924 interview with opera singer Amelita Galli-Curci on the subject of feminism, and a 1926 interview with H. G. Wells in which he speculated on the century ahead. She also wrote for Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar.

Much of Bourbon's career was devoted to radio, where she worked as a writer, producer, and director. Her radio credits include Burns and Allen's Hollywood Hotel, the game show Double or Nothing, which ran from 1940 to 1954, the drama anthology The Campbell Playhouse in 1940, the comedy series The Judy Canova Show from 1943 to 1944, Club Fifteen from 1947 to 1953, and the soap operas Brenda Curtis, which aired from 1939 to 1940, and Life Begins in 1940. She also performed as an actress on radio, appearing in The Vanishing Lady in 1957.

For film, Bourbon co-wrote Born That Way in 1936 and contributed co-written stories that were adapted as Atlantic Adventure in 1935 and Roaming Lady in 1936. Her television acting work consisted of three roles in individual episodes: Thriller in 1961, The Fugitive in 1963, and Mission: Impossible in 1968.

In her personal life, Bourbon married English writer and editor K. Norman Hillson in 1928; the marriage later ended in divorce.