Thelma Ritter

Thelma Ritter was an American actress born on February 14, 1902, in Brooklyn, New York, the first child of Charles and Lucy Ritter. Her father worked as a bookkeeper and later as an office manager. Ritter's stage ambitions began early: at age eleven she played Puck in a semi-professional production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as a teenager she performed in high school plays and stock companies. After graduating from Manual Training High School in Park Slope, Brooklyn, she trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her earliest professional work came through stock theater companies in New York and New England. She married actor Joseph Moran, with whom she had two children, Monica and Joe. Ritter stepped away from acting for a period to raise her family; in the mid-1930s, her husband left performing to become an actors' agent and later an advertising executive.

Ritter's Broadway career spanned four decades, from 1926 to 1966. Her stage credits include The Shelf, In Times Square, New Girl in Town, and UTBU. Her most celebrated Broadway achievement came with the 1957 musical New Girl in Town, for which she shared the 1958 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical with co-star Gwen Verdon.

Her screen career began with a brief, uncredited appearance in Miracle on 34th Street in 1947, in which she played a frustrated mother unable to locate a toy that Kris Kringle had promised her son. An uncredited role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives followed in 1949, and Mankiewicz subsequently cast her as Birdie Coonan in All About Eve in 1950, a performance that earned her the first of six Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress. That total — drawn from All About Eve, The Mating Season, With a Song in My Heart, Pickup on South Street, Pillow Talk, and Birdman of Alcatraz — represents more nominations in that category than any other actress has received. She did not win in any of those years. Among her other notable film appearances were James Stewart's nurse in Rear Window in 1954, Doris Day's housekeeper Alma in Pillow Talk in 1959, and roles in The Misfits in 1961 and How the West Was Won in 1962.

Known for her strong New York City accent, diminutive stature, and plain appearance, Ritter gravitated toward working-class characters in both comedic and dramatic contexts. She was also active in television during the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in episodic drama series including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, and The United States Steel Hour. In 1956 she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her work on Goodyear Television Playhouse. In 1955 she co-hosted the Academy Awards ceremony alongside Bob Hope. Her final public appearance was on The Jerry Lewis Show on January 23, 1968.

Ritter suffered a heart attack at her residence in Queens, New York City, on January 27, 1969, and died from a second heart attack on February 5, 1969, in New York City, at the age of 66. In 2019, she was included in an Evening Standard list of ten women who changed the face of film.