Irene Rich

Irene Frances Rich, born Irene Frances Luther on October 13, 1891, in Buffalo, New York, was an American actress whose career spanned silent film, sound film, radio, and stage. She died on April 22, 1988, in Hope Ranch, California, at the age of 96, from heart failure.

Rich married for the first time at age 17, wedding salesman Elvo Elcourt Deffenbaugh on February 17, 1909, at All Saints' Cathedral in Spokane, Washington. The marriage produced one daughter, born Irene Frances Luther Deffenbaugh, who later took her stepfather's surname and worked as a stage and film actress in the 1930s under the name Frances Rich before establishing herself as a sculptor. The marriage ended after two years, by which point the family had relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Rich subsequently married Charles Henry Rich, a lieutenant in the United States Army, on January 9, 1912, in Portland, Oregon. The two had met while he was stationed with the 25th Infantry at Fort George Wright in Spokane. Their daughter, Martha Jane Rich, was born on December 13, 1916. That marriage also ended after four years, after which Rich worked in real estate to support her two daughters before traveling to Hollywood in 1918 and finding work as a film extra.

Her film career gained momentum through her association with Will Rogers, for whom she appeared in eight pictures, among them Water Water Everywhere (1920), The Strange Boarder (1920), Jes' Call Me Jim (1920), Boys Will Be Boys (1921), and The Ropin' Fool (1921). Rich frequently portrayed society women, a type she embodied in the 1925 adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan and again in Queen of the Yukon (1940). Later in her film work she took on frontier roles, playing the mother of Gail Russell's character in John Wayne's Angel and the Badman and portraying Mrs. O'Rourke, wife of Sergeant O'Rourke played by Ward Bond, in John Ford's Fort Apache.

In radio, Rich built a substantial parallel career throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. From 1933 to 1944 she hosted a nationwide anthology program of serialized mini-dramas titled Dear John, also known as The Irene Rich Show, with actor Gale Gordon serving as her leading man. In the early 1940s she starred in Glorious One on NBC Blue. Her contributions to both film and radio were recognized with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures at 6225 Hollywood Boulevard and one for radio at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard.

Rich's Broadway career extended from 1935 to 1948. In 1935 she appeared in Seven Keys to Baldpate, the production starring George M. Cohan, the creator of the play. She returned to Broadway in 1948 with As the Girls Go.

Rich married for the third time on April 6, 1927, in Del Monte, California, to real estate figure David Ferguson Blankenhorn, at the home of William May Garland. Blankenhorn, a longtime resident of Pasadena and San Francisco, was known in the Los Angeles real estate market and had handled the transaction through which William Wrigley Jr. purchased Catalina Island in 1919. The couple separated multiple times in 1931 and finalized their divorce that November. In 1949, Rich became connected to a widely reported incident in which Agnes Elizabeth Garnier, the personal secretary of businessman John Edwin Owen, shot and killed Owen. A Riverside County Sheriff's Department investigator stated that Garnier blamed Rich for coming between them. Rich maintained that she and Owen were only friends. Garnier pleaded not guilty, was ultimately convicted of manslaughter, and received a sentence of one to ten years. She was released from Tehachapi Prison in May 1951 after serving less than a year and a half.

On February 28, 1950, Rich married her fourth husband, George Henry Clifford, a public utilities executive and president of Stone and Webster Service Corporation, at The Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York City. In 1956 the couple purchased an avocado ranch within Hope Ranch, near Santa Barbara, where both lived for the remainder of their lives.