Ruth Gordon

Ruth Gordon Jones (October 30, 1896 – August 28, 1985) was an American actress, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist whose career spanned seven decades. Born in the Wollaston section of Quincy, Massachusetts, at 41 Winthrop Avenue, she was the daughter of Annie Tapley (née Ziegler) and Clinton Jones, and had one sibling, an older half-sister named Claire from her father's first marriage. Gordon was baptized an Episcopalian. A personal reply from actress Hazel Dawn, whom Gordon had seen in a stage production of The Pink Lady, inspired her to pursue acting before she had finished at Quincy High School. Her father, though skeptical of her prospects, accompanied her to New York in 1914 and enrolled her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Gordon made her first screen appearances in 1915 as an extra in silent films shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey, among them The Whirl of Life, a film based on the lives of Vernon and Irene Castle, in which she appeared as a dancer. That same year she made her Broadway debut in a revival of Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, playing Nibs alongside Maude Adams. The performance earned her a favorable notice from critic Alexander Woollcott, who described her as "ever so gay" and subsequently became her friend and mentor. In 1918, Gordon appeared opposite actor Gregory Kelly in the Broadway adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Seventeen, and the two went on to tour together in Frank Craven's The First Year and Tarkington's Clarence and Tweedles. Gordon and Kelly married in 1921. In December 1920, Gordon had undergone surgery in a Chicago hospital to have her legs broken and straightened to correct lifelong bow-leggedness, and after a three-month recovery she joined Kelly in Indianapolis, where they established a repertory company. Kelly died of heart disease in 1927 at the age of 35.

Gordon's Broadway career extended from 1925 to 1932 and included appearances in the play Lovely Lady, the revue Hey Nonny Nonny!, the musical East Wind, and the revue George White's Scandals. Around the time of Kelly's death, she had been appearing on Broadway as Bobby in Maxwell Anderson's Saturday's Children, a serious role that marked a departure from the "beautiful, but dumb" characters she had long been typecast in. In 1929, while starring in the hit play Serena Blandish, Gordon became pregnant by the show's producer, Jed Harris. Their son, Jones Harris, was born in Paris that year; Gordon and Harris never married but raised their son together, and by 1932 the family was living in a small brownstone in New York City. Jones Harris later married actress and heiress Heidi Vanderbilt.

Throughout the 1930s, Gordon continued working on stage, taking on roles including Mattie in Ethan Frome, Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley's The Country Wife at London's Old Vic and on Broadway, and Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, performed in Central City, Colorado, and on Broadway. She had been signed to a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract in the early 1930s but did not appear in an MGM film until 1941, when she took a supporting role in Greta Garbo's final film, Two-Faced Woman. In the early 1940s she also appeared in Abe Lincoln in Illinois as Mary Todd Lincoln, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet as Mrs. Ehrlich, and Action in the North Atlantic. Her Broadway acting in the 1940s included Iris in Paul Vincent Carroll's The Strings, My Lord, Are False, Natasha in Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic's revival of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, and leading roles in her own plays Over Twenty-One and The Leading Lady.

In 1942, Gordon married writer Garson Kanin. The two collaborated on screenplays for the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy films Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), both directed by George Cukor, and received Academy Award nominations for both scripts as well as for Cukor's A Double Life (1947). Gordon also wrote the film adaptation of her autobiographical play Years Ago, which became The Actress (1953), produced by MGM with Jean Simmons in the lead role. She published three volumes of memoirs during the 1970s: My Side, Myself Among Others, and An Open Book, and in 1982 authored the novel Shady Lady.

Gordon's stage work continued into the 1950s, and she received a 1956 Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, a role she performed in London, Edinburgh, and Berlin. Her film career gained renewed momentum in the 1960s, when she received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for Inside Daisy Clover (1966), opposite Natalie Wood. She won a second Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary's Baby (1968), Roman Polanski's adaptation of Ira Levin's novel about a satanic cult in a Manhattan apartment building. Accepting the award at the 41st Academy Awards, Gordon noted that she had been in the business for fifty years and was seventy-two years old at the time.

Her later film work included What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), Where's Poppa? (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), for which she received another Golden Globe nomination playing Maude opposite Bud Cort, Every Which Way but Loose (1978), Any Which Way You Can (1980), and My Bodyguard (1980). On television, she appeared in the sitcoms Rhoda and Newhart, portrayed a murderous author in the 1977 Columbo episode "Try and Catch Me," and hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977. She won a Primetime Emmy Award for her appearance in the 1979 Taxi episode "Sugar Mama," in which her character attempts to hire a taxi driver played by Judd Hirsch as a male escort. Gordon's final Broadway appearance came in 1976, when she played Mrs. Warren in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, produced by Joseph Papp at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.