LEST WE FORGET RUTH GORDON
(October 30, 1896 - August 27, 1985)

She described herself as a "visceral legend" in her third and final autobiography Ruth Gordon: An Open Book.

An actress known for her eccentric comedy, a playwright whose works were staged on Broadway and adapted for the screen, and best remembered on stage for her portrayal of Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder's
The Matchmaker, she knew she wanted to act from an early age, especially, when she travelled to Boston to see Hazel Dawn, a leading actress, in The Pink Lady.   As she has written in her second autobiography,
My Side,
       "If the Colonial Theatre hadn't opened in 1900 with Ben Hur, would I be an actress?  If C.M.S. McClellan and Ivan Caryll hadn't written The Pink Lady...if Mr. Tout hadn't gone to bed with Mrs. Tout and had Hazel Dawn, would I be an actress?  I believe so. Why? I'm a believer. If The Pink Lady hadn't rung a bell, something else would have."

     After graduating from Quincy High School, she studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York for a term, when she was told she had no potential.  She then began the labor intensive task of finding an acting job on her own.

She acted in various touring companies and married her leading man in
Seventeen, Gregory Kelly.  She returned to New York (1923) to act in Tweedles, which the NY Times noted was 'admirably acted'. In
Mrs. Partridge Presents (1925) she received praise for her comic pauses and timing, and in the same year she delighted audiences by her comic mannerisms in The Fall of Eve----her rapid walk, her jerky arm movements, and comically blank face. Brooks Atkinson (NY Times) wrote about her performance in Saturday's Children (1927) noting the same comic vain but with a "curiously subtle penetration.'  Later she earned praise in her sensitive rendering of Serena in Serena Blandish.  Atkinson would write: "One of the most thoroughly individual of our comediennes who has progressed from trickery into conscious method."
   It was a mark of her growing dramatic versatility that she was successful in the role of one of the assaulted women in They Shall Not Die, based on the Scottsboro case.  Other successful roles were Mistress Pinchwife in The Country Wife (1935) and
Mattie in Ethan Frome (1936). Her attention to detail, emotional investment in the character as witnessed when she anguished over a 'broken dish' was hailed as a tremendous accomplishment of the American stage.
          After appearing in The Country Wife as the first American to appear in an Old Vic production, she returned to New York and married Garson Kanin who was her second husband.( Gregory Kelly had died in 1927). She was considered a superb Natasha in The Three Sisters (1942).

Ruth and Garson

She wrote three plays and acted in two of them.
Over Twenty-One (1944), a flip comedy, ran for 221 performances; Years Ago, an autobiographical play, was considered amusing but Leading Lady which she co-authored with Garson, was judged uneven and closed after 8 performances.

In 1948 she and Garson began writing screenplays and were nominated for an Oscar for A Double Life and won the Box Office Ribbon Award and another Oscar nomination for Adam's Rib (MGM, 1949).

Her preparation for Dolly Levi was intensive and Brooks Atkinson was in awe of her character who was "sweeping wide, growling, leering, cutting through her scenes with sharp gestures, filling in every corner with a detail or a sardonic observation....The performance is epochally funny." A triumphant success, The Matchmaker ran for 1,078 performances. Garson Kanin wrote:  "Once engaged, the performance of the job came first. She was in the habit of going over her part every day. She played The Matchmaker 1,078 times (without missing a single performance) and on the afternoon of the 1,078th, I was astonished to come upon her "going over her part."  (My Side, preface)

Ruth as Dolly Levi

After a string of less than triumphant performances in rather mediocre and unmemorable plays, in 1966 she received an Oscar for her role as Minnie Castevet in the film Rosemary's Baby. Accepting it she proclaimed, "I can't tell ya how encouragin' a thing like this is!"

Ironically,  she received the American Academy's Award of Achievement in 1968,  an award that was especially gratifying since she had been told years earlier by the Academy's president that she had no talent.

However in 1971 she won world-wide praise as Maude in Harold and Maude, a film which achieved cult status especially among college students.

During the remainder of her career she would appear in twenty-two more films and at least that many television appearances through her seventies and eighties including such successful sitcoms as Rhoda, Newhart, Taxi, and guest starred on Columbo in the episode "Try and Catch Me."


I found a litany of her longings in My Side (pp. 329-330) and fell in love with her writing ability and inspired by her truth and passion.
   "When you have to go without things, splurge on dreams. Dream you're a somebody and write your own definition. In my room at 14 Elmwood Avenue with the yellow roses on the wallpaper, I'd dream up how to astonish people, how to be pretty, extravagant, look like an actress, look fast, have great clothes, have a maid, a cook, a butler, a Scotch terrier, a lapis lazuli anything, a white celluloid toilet seat set with my monogram, silk stockings with no darns, be rich, be an actress, see all the plays, go as often as I wanted to on the train to Boston, get an ice cream soda at Huyler's, have 'bought' clothes, have wider hair ribbons than anybody, have actresses answer my letters and send their pictures, have whipped cream, old-fashioned strawberry shortcake, opera caramels, a striped blazer, have an upright piano, get sheet music of the shows I saw...to go to New York to live, to know society people, to have plenty of partners at a dance, to buy Theatre magazine, to buy Elite, to sit in the first balcony and have a thick program and not go in the gallery entrance.....to be tall and have dark hair, have a beautiful bathing suit and a frilled rubber cap...."

Guest star on Colombo

According to Glenn Close, "she had a great gift for living the moment and it kept her ageless."

According to Garson, in his preface to My Side, written after her death:
"She was on the verge of beginning Act Two of a new play when she died. She was eighty-eight years old and I had the indescribably great fortune of sharing precisely half of that wondrous life.
Three days before her death, she said, "I'm in love with the past, but I'm having a love affair with the future."



Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989    Linda Tolman
Wikipedia   Ruth Gordon
My Side, The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon with an introduction by Garson Kanin