Ruth Gordon(1896-1985)

When Ruth Gordon convinced her father, a sea captain, to let her pursue an acting career, she came to New York and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She acted in a few silent films that were made at Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1915. She made her Broadway debut in "Peter Pan" as Nibs the same year. The next 20 years she spent on the stage, even appearing at the Old Vic in London in the successful run of "The Country Wife" in 1936. Nearly 25 years after her film debut, she briefly returned to films. Her most memorable film role during this period in the early 1940s was as Mary Todd in the film Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).She then left Hollywood to return to the theater. Back in New York, she married her second husband, Garson Kanin in 1942 (her first husband, Gregory Kelly, a stage actor, died in 1927). She began writing plays and, later, she and her husband collaborated on screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose on-screen relationship was modeled on their own marriage. She returned to acting in films in the 1960s. It is during this last period of her career that she became a film star again, with memorable roles in the films Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971). She wrote several books during the mid-1970s and appeared on TV. She won an Emmy for her role on the TV series Taxi (1978) in 1979.