Ruth Gordon

Biography

Ruth Gordon’s life began with nautical charts and salt air—until she traded them for footlights. In 1915, fresh from convincing her sea-captain father that the stage, not the deck, was her destiny, she enrolled at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That same whirlwind year she slipped into a silent short shot across the Hudson at Fort Lee and, weeks later, bounded onto Broadway as Nibs in *Peter Pan*. For the next two decades she rarely left the boards, sailing as far as London’s Old Vic for a triumphant 1936 run of *The Country Wife*. A quarter-century after those first flickers in Fort Lee, Hollywood lured her back; she stepped into the calico and steel of Mary Todd for *Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (1940), then promptly reclaimed Manhattan’s glare. In 1942 she wed playwright Garson Kanin (her first husband, actor Gregory Kelly, had died in 1927). Together the Kanins spun urbane comedies for Tracy and Hepburn, letting their own bantering marriage serve as the template. Gordon’s pen proved as nimble as her acting: stage hits flowed, followed by polished screenplays. At 72 she stormed cinema again, this time as a bona-fide star—first the devilishly neighborly Minnie Castevet in *Rosemary’s Baby* (1968), then the septuagenarian free spirit who hijacks a hearse in *Harold and Maude* (1971). Between takes she filled shelves with memoirs and novels, popped up on television, and in 1979 accepted an Emmy for one riotous guest ride on *Taxi*, capping a career that refused to anchor in any single harbor.