When Ruth Gordon convinced her father, a sea captain, to let her pursue
acting she came to New York and studied at the American Academy of
Dramatic Arts. She acted in a few silents 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 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 returned to movies briefly.
Her most memorable role during this period in the early 1940s was as
Mary Todd in
Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).
She left Hollywood to return to theater. Back in New York, she married
Garson Kanin in 1942 (her first husband
Gregory Kelly, a stage actor, died
in 1927). She began writing plays, and, later, her husband and she
collaborated on screenplays for
Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy, whose screen
relationship was modeled on their own marriage. She returned to film
acting during the 1960s. It is during this last period of her career
that she became a movie star, with memorable roles in
Rosemaries Baby (1968) and
Harold und Maude (1971). She
wrote several books during the mid-1970s and appeared on TV. She won an
Emmy for her role on Taxi (1978) in
1979.
