Ruth Maycliffe

Ruth Maycliffe, born Fern Krehbiel on December 19, 1888, near Winfield, Kansas, was an American actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1908 to 1917. She was the daughter of Reuben and Luella (Roberts) Krehbiel; her mother, Luella, was a Socialist Party organizer who traveled the country delivering speeches. Maycliffe grew up in Winfield and Coffeyville before relocating with her mother to Kansas City at the age of sixteen, where she studied at a drama school and performed with the Woodward Stock Company in both Omaha and Kansas City.

In the fall of 1907, Maycliffe moved to New York and secured a role in the Clyde Fitch vaudeville comedy Miss McCobb, Manicuriste. Fitch was reportedly so impressed by her performance that he wrote a role specifically for her in his next production, Girls, a comedy in which she made her Broadway debut in 1908. The following year she starred opposite Charles Cherry in Fitch's The Bachelor, and in 1910 she appeared in Edward Peple's The Spitfire. In 1912 she took the stage in George M. Cohan's Officer 666, a production that was subsequently adapted as a silent film. Her additional Broadway credits include 70, Girls, 70, The Little Spitfire, and The Bachelor's Baby. After marrying and retiring from acting, she returned to the stage in 1917 for Saturday to Monday, described by a reviewer in Life magazine as a satire of the women's suffrage movement, in which Maycliffe played a character who begins with strong convictions but ultimately reveals a different side of her nature.

Maycliffe's personal life attracted considerable press attention, not all of it accurate. The Washington Post described her as an accomplished horsewoman capable of roping a steer in record time, a report that reportedly prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to invite her to the White House. In 1914 she disembarked from the ocean liner Laconia claiming to have married a Portuguese nobleman and to hold the title of Princess Braganza d'Avellar. News accounts circulated that the prince had been killed in a revolutionary battle in Portugal shortly after their marriage, leaving her a widow. Her hometown newspaper refuted separate claims, also widely printed, that she had been raised on a cattle ranch in Mexico.

In 1919 Maycliffe met Georges Benetau du Buat (1894–1973), a French officer conducting engineering work at Fort Dix, and the two married. It was only upon traveling to France to meet his family, where she was received as the Countess du Buat, that she discovered her husband held a title of nobility. The couple settled in Paris in 1920 and later moved in 1937 to a village in Brittany. Following World War II they returned to the United States, where Georges worked as an electrical engineer for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. In 1969 they relocated to Italy. Georges Benetau du Buat died in 1973 and is buried in Bordighera. Maycliffe, by then known as the Countess Fern du Buat, died in San Francisco on November 9, 1981, and is buried in the Union Cemetery in Winfield, Kansas.