Ruth Sobotka

Ruth Sobotka (September 4, 1925 – June 17, 1967) was an Austrian-born American dancer, actress, costume designer, art director, and painter whose career spanned ballet, Broadway, film, and theater. Born in Vienna to architect and interior designer Walter Sobotka (1888–1972) and Viennese actress Gisela Schönau, she was the couple's only child. In 1938, the family emigrated from Austria to the United States. Sobotka pursued formal training in set design at the University of Pennsylvania and earned her degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the institution that later became Carnegie Mellon University. She also trained at the School of American Ballet.

Her ballet career centered on George Balanchine's companies, beginning with the Ballet Society, of which she was a member from 1946 to 1948, and continuing with its successor, the New York City Ballet, where she danced from 1949 to 1961. Her roles in Balanchine works included The Four Temperaments (1946), Serenade, Apollo, and Symphony in C (1946), the pas de quatre in Swan Lake (1951), Concerto Barocco, The Nutcracker (1954), Ivesiana (1954), Agon (1957), and The Figure in the Carpet (1961). Beyond Balanchine's repertoire, Sobotka danced with James Waring's company and performed for other major American choreographers. She also contributed as a costume designer, creating designs for works by Paul Taylor, Erick Hawkins, and John Taras. For Jerome Robbins' ballet The Cage (1951), she both designed the costumes and performed in the production, and she appeared as Robbins' wife in his Tyl Eulenspiegel the same year.

Sobotka's Broadway career ran from 1944 to 1954. She danced in the musical Sadie Thompson in 1944 and returned to Broadway a decade later in the Balanchine revival of On Your Toes in 1954. Her work in film during this period included an appearance as "The Girl" in Man Ray's segment "Ruth, Roses and Revolvers," part of Hans Richter's avant-garde film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947). She later appeared in a cameo as the ballerina "Iris" in Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955), performing choreography by David Vaughan, and served as art director on Kubrick's next feature, The Killing (1956).

Sobotka was Kubrick's second wife. The two met in 1952, married on January 15, 1955, and divorced in 1957. A prior marriage to Donald Boose had been annulled.

Following her resignation from the New York City Ballet in 1961, Sobotka shifted her focus toward acting and theater. She studied under Herbert Berghof, Uta Hagen, and later Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and took on choreographic work for the American Shakespeare Festival in Stamford, Connecticut. Her Off-Broadway credits included the role of Charlotta Ivanovna in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at Theatre Four in November 1962. In 1963, she joined the Seattle Repertory Theatre for their inaugural season, playing Cordelia in King Lear.

Sobotka died on June 17, 1967, at Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital, later known as New York Medical College, following a brief illness. She was 41 years old.