Ruth Nelson

Ruth Gloria Nelson (August 2, 1905 – September 12, 1992) was an American stage and film actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1928 to 1981. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, she was the daughter of Sanford Leroy Nelson and vaudeville actress Eva Mudge. She attended Immaculate Heart Convent School in Los Angeles before pursuing formal acting training, first under Daniel Frohman and subsequently with Richard Boleslawski at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York City during the early 1920s.

Nelson's New York stage debut came on April 4, 1928, at the Laboratory Theatre, where she portrayed the title character in Jean-Jacques Bernard's Martine under Boleslawski's direction. Two additional appearances followed over the next two seasons — in Chekhov's The Seagull and Vladimir Kirshon's Red Rust — before she became, in 1931, a charter member of the newly formed Group Theatre collective. She remained with the Group Theatre throughout its entire run from 1931 to 1941, earning particular recognition for her portrayal of the chief striker's wife in Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. Her Broadway credits during this period and beyond included Adam Solitaire, Retreat to Pleasure, The Grass Harp, and Long Day's Journey Into Night, among other productions.

Nelson's connection to Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night proved especially significant and long-lasting. She first appeared in the play on Broadway in 1957, initially as Florence Eldridge's understudy and later as the permanent replacement for an ailing Fay Bainter during the production's national tour. She reprised the role of Mary Tyrone in a 1968 regional production directed by her stepson James Cromwell. Both critic Claudia Cassidy and director and Group Theatre co-founder Robert Lewis judged her Mary Tyrone the finest they had ever seen.

Following the Group Theatre's dissolution in 1941, Nelson relocated to Hollywood, where she worked for 20th Century Fox and other studios throughout the 1940s. Her film credits from this period include Wilson, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) — directed by fellow Group Theatre alumnus Elia Kazan — Humoresque, and Kazan's The Sea of Grass (1947). Her film career was interrupted when her husband, director John Cromwell, was falsely accused of Communist sympathies by actor Adolphe Menjou before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, resulting in Cromwell's blacklisting. Nelson declined most acting offers during this period, including a Broadway role — as a wife in what became Death of a Salesman — in order to remain in Los Angeles and support her husband.

Nelson had been absent from Hollywood films for nearly three decades when she returned to the screen in 1977, appearing alongside Cromwell in Robert Altman's 3 Women and in The Late Show, written and directed by Robert Benton and produced by Altman. The following year, she and Cromwell both appeared in Altman's ensemble comedy A Wedding, with Nelson playing Aunt Beatrice Sloan Cory and Cromwell portraying Bishop Martin. In 1980, she appeared with stepson James Cromwell in the television film A Christmas Without Snow, directed by John Korty, and two years later the pair performed together onstage in the Public Theater's production of Botho Strauss's Three Acts of Recognition, staged by Richard Foreman.

Nelson's stage work extended well beyond Broadway. Critic Stanley Kauffmann, reviewing the 1966 Guthrie Theatre revival of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Douglas Campbell, singled out her performance as Mrs. Antrobus as the best of three productions he had seen, noting that she was matriarchal without being maudlin and that in one moment — mourning her murdered son — she touched true elegy. Her final Broadway credit came with To Grandmother's House We Go in 1981.

Her last feature film appearance was in Penny Marshall's Awakenings (1990), in which she played the mother of a hospital patient portrayed by Robert De Niro. Several critics singled out her performance for praise, including the Wall Street Journal's Julie Salamon. In her 2012 memoir, Marshall recalled that Nelson was eighty-four at the time of filming, had battled a brain tumor, and also suffered from arthritis, but was determined to take the role.

Nelson was married twice. Her first marriage, to actor William Challee on August 2, 1931, ended in divorce in 1937. In 1947, she married actor and director John Cromwell, whom she had first met two years earlier on the set of Anna and the King of Siam. That marriage lasted thirty-two years, until Cromwell's death from a pulmonary embolism in 1979. She was the stepmother of actor James Cromwell. Nelson died on September 12, 1992, at her home in New York City from brain cancer complicated by a stroke and pneumonia.