Ruth Gordon, the playwright who became a movie star after seventy

Ruth Gordon

Photo: Stage Publishing Company, Inc.; Myron P. Davis / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 30, 1896 Quincy, Massachusetts, United States
Died	August 28, 1985 (88)
Occupation	Actress and screenwriter
Known for	Rosemary's Baby, Harold and Maude, Every Which Way but Loose
Awards	Academy Award · 2 Golden Globe · Emmy · Women in Film Crystal

The most famous thing Ruth Gordon ever said from a stage took one sentence. Holding an Academy Award for playing a meddling neighbor who turns out to belong to a coven, the small woman with the reedy voice told the audience she could not tell them how encouraging a thing like this was. The room laughed because it understood the joke: she had been working for half a century and had co-written two of the sharpest comedies of the studio era before Hollywood handed her a statuette. Gordon was early to almost everything in her profession except fame.

Quincy, Massachusetts, the town south of Boston where Ruth Gordon Jones grew up, gave her a first taste of being looked at: as a baby, her photograph sold Mellin’s Food, the infant formula made by the company that employed her father, Clinton Jones. The decisive push came by mail. As a teenager she wrote to the actresses she admired asking for signed pictures, and Hazel Dawn, whom she had seen in The Pink Lady, answered in person. Her father doubted the plan, but he took her to New York himself and enrolled her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

The start was quick for a girl born on October 30, 1896, who had reached Manhattan in 1914. In 1915 she worked as an extra in silent films shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey, dancing in The Whirl of Life, and that same year made her Broadway debut as Nibs, one of the Lost Boys, in a revival of Peter Pan led by Maude Adams. Alexander Woollcott, the most powerful critic in town, found her “ever so gay” and became her friend and mentor. In 1918 she played opposite Gregory Kelly in Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen; they toured together and married in 1921. Shortly before the wedding she checked into a Chicago hospital to have her legs broken and reset to correct the bow legs she had had all her life, a detail that says more about her will than any review.

Kelly died of heart disease in 1927, at 35, just as Gordon had escaped years of playing the pretty, dim girl and was starring as Bobby in Maxwell Anderson’s Saturday’s Children. Two years later, during the hit Serena Blandish, she became pregnant by the show’s producer, Jed Harris. Their son, Jones Harris, was born in Paris. The couple never married, and his parentage became public knowledge only as social conventions loosened. The 1930s made her a serious stage actress: Mattie in Ethan Frome, Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife at London’s Old Vic and on Broadway, and Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Hollywood was slower. An early MGM contract produced nothing, and her first real studio parts came in the early 1940s: Mary Todd Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, the scientist’s wife in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, a supporting role in Two-Faced Woman, Greta Garbo’s last film, and Action in the North Atlantic. In 1942 she married the writer and director Garson Kanin, sixteen years her junior, and the marriage turned into one of the most productive partnerships in American film writing.

Gordon had already written Over 21, a wartime comedy that ran 221 performances on Broadway in 1944 with herself in the lead. With Kanin she wrote A Double Life, Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, all directed by George Cukor and all nominated for the Academy Award for screenplay. The last two were built for their close friends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and borrowed from the way the two actually argued. The couple also wrote The Marrying Kind, and Gordon adapted her autobiographical play Years Ago into The Actress, with Jean Simmons as the girl from Quincy who talks her father into letting her go to New York. On stage she kept working at the top level: her Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker played London, Edinburgh and Berlin and earned a Tony nomination in 1956.

Then came the second career nobody planned. Playing Natalie Wood’s mother in Inside Daisy Clover brought her a first acting Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe. Roman Polanski cast her as Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby, a chatty, overfamiliar neighbor whose kindness is the most frightening thing in the film, and at 72 she won both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for supporting actress. Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude followed, with Gordon as a 79-year-old free spirit who falls in love with a young man, played by Bud Cort, who stages fake suicides to get attention. It failed with critics and at the box office, slowly found an audience in repertory cinemas, did not turn a profit until 1983, and entered the National Film Registry in 1997.

That late success came with a price, and it still shapes how she is remembered. The industry that had called Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike George Cukor films, or Hepburn-Tracy films, found it easy to file Gordon as the eccentric old lady of the 1970s. Talk shows wanted the persona, she hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977, and she played Ma Boggs, the cantankerous mother in Clint Eastwood‘s Every Which Way but Loose and its sequel. Gordon fed the image herself, and it was good business, but it buried the playwright. The woman who had written the most evenly matched couples of the studio era, two people who win and lose arguments in turn, is now best known for lines other people wrote for her.

Television kept her busy into her eighties. She earned an Emmy nomination for Rhoda, played a murderous author in the 1977 Columbo episode “Try and Catch Me”, and won the Emmy in 1979 for the Taxi episode “Sugar Mama”, as a woman who tries to hire Judd Hirsch’s cab driver as a paid escort. Her last Broadway role was Mrs. Warren in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, produced by Joseph Papp at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 1976. In the 1970s she also published three volumes of memoirs, Myself Among Others, My Side and An Open Book, and later a novel, Shady Lady. In 1983 Women in Film gave her its Crystal Award.

Ruth Gordon died after a stroke on August 28, 1985, at 88, in her summer home in Edgartown, Massachusetts. Kanin, her husband of 43 years, was with her and said that even her last day had been full, including a morning spent working on a new play. Two weeks earlier she had made her final public appearance at a benefit screening of Harold and Maude.

The Library of Congress registry now holds Adam’s Rib, Rosemary’s Baby and Harold and Maude: one film she wrote and two she made as an actress past seventy. Community theaters still stage Harold and Maude, as one in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, did in February 2026. The writer and the late-blooming star were the same person all along, and her work keeps asking the audience to stop treating them as two.

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Tags: actors, actresses, screenwriters, Rosemary's Baby, Ruth Gordon, Adam's Rib

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