Ruth Chatterton

Ruth Chatterton was already a celebrated Broadway actress, admired for her diction and dramatic authority, when Hollywood came calling with the arrival of sound. It was a shrewd match: as silent stars floundered before the microphone, the theater-trained Chatterton spoke with an ease and elegance that made her one of the first great voices of the talkies. Audiences flocked to hear a real actress act, and she earned Academy Award nominations for Madame X (1929) and Sarah and Son (1930), playing suffering mothers with an aristocratic restraint that set the tone for the emerging women's picture.

Through the pre-Code years she often played strong, worldly, sometimes predatory women, none more striking than the wealthy wife who keeps a young lover in Female (1933). Her finest hour came in 1936 as Fran Dodsworth in William Wyler's Dodsworth, a devastating portrait of a middle-aged wife clinging to vanishing youth, cruel and pitiable at once, widely judged the performance of her career even though the Academy overlooked it.

What set Chatterton apart from her peers was a life that spilled far beyond the soundstage. She became one of the very few licensed women pilots in America, a close friend of Amelia Earhart, flying solo across the country and lending her name and organizing energy to competitive air derbies. She was a genuine sportswoman-adventurer at a time when such a role for a movie star was almost unheard of.

As her screen career waned in the late 1930s, she simply moved on to new arenas rather than fading. She returned to the stage, took early television roles, and in the 1950s launched a successful second act as a novelist, publishing several well-received books. She died in Connecticut in 1961 after a cerebral hemorrhage, having lived at least three full careers. In an industry that discarded aging actresses, Chatterton was that rare figure who kept redefining herself, refusing to be remembered as anything so narrow as a movie star.