Ruth Gordon Young: See the Star Long Before Her Roles in 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Harold and Maude'

There's never been another star quite like Ruth Gordon. Best known for her roles in '60s and '70s classics like Rosemary's Baby and Harold and Maude, the Oscar-winning actress cornered the market on playing eccentric older women. Her performances still feel fresh today, largely because it remains rare to a see woman who fully embraces her old age on the screen.

Gordon, who also appeared in films like Inside Daisy Clover, Where's Poppa? and Every Which Way But Loose, is so closely associated with playing old women that one may well think she was somehow born old. In fact, the majority of film fans have never even seen the actress, who was born way back in 1896 and died at 88 in 1985, in her early days.

Here's a look back at Ruth Gordon young, along with some fascinating facts about the actress' life.

How the actress got her start

Gordon studied acting at New York City's American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and began her movie career with uncredited bit parts in three 1915 silent films, The Whirl of Life, Madame Butterfly and Camille. Interestingly, she didn't act onscreen again until 1940, when she played Mary Todd Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois. In the '30s, she had a contract with MGM, but she wasn't actually cast in any movies during this time.

Ruth Gordon on Broadway

Though Gordon had a 25-year break between her early films, that didn't mean she wasn't working. The actress performed in many Broadway plays, and made her stage debut in a 1916 production of Peter Pan, playing one of the Lost Boys. She could be seen in a variety of plays in the '20s and '30s, including classics like Ethan Frome, The Country Wife and A Doll's House.

In addition to starring in plays, the multitalented Gordon also wrote plays of her own. One of her plays, The Actress, was a biographical work that was made into a film starring Jean Simmons as Gordon in 1953.

A talented screenwriter

In 1942, Gordon married her second husband, the writer Garson Kanin. The couple cowrote a number of screenplays together, most notably for the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy films Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). They also cowrote the script for the 1952 Judy Holliday film The Marrying Kind.

Reflecting on the work of Gordon and Kanin, George Cukor, the Golden Age filmmaker who directed all the films they wrote, said, "It was a very happy and very equal collaboration. Ruth and Garson worked very closely together — no question of a writer trying to get his wife a job."

The Ruth Gordon renaissance

Gordon's career trajectory — going from bit parts in silent films to Broadway to screenwriting to a handful of '40s roles, only to stage a stunning comeback as an old woman in the '60s — is pretty much unheard of. Gordon is the rare actress whose work she did later in life is much better known than the work she did when she was young.

Gordon may have been small (she stood just 5 feet tall), but she had a big personality, and used that to stage her '60s renaissance. As she put it in a 1971 New York Times interview, "I have roughly seventy years of experience, and that’s seventy years with the blinders on, ’cause I’m a careerist. I love people, and I love a lotta other things, but I’m a dedicated careerist. I’m just gonna be what I’m gonna be. And that’s nothin’ to do with the time, nothin’ to do with my age, nothin’ to do with whether my hair is tinted or whether it’s gray, or whether I’ve got wrinkles or whether I’ve had my face lifted."

She continued, "My talent — of which there is a great deal — has just been trainin’ itself for seventy years. And I have to see that I realize what I set out to do, ’cause I’ve got a helluva investment in myself, and it would be terrible, just terrible, if it didn’t realize itself."

Gordon was perfectly cast in the role of the quirky older woman, and it's clear that she saw her age as a blessing. At the same time, she was also creative and dedicated to keeping up with the younger generation. As Kanin, her husband and creative collaborator, said in her obituary, "Her great joy was hanging around young people. She was always very much involved in the new stuff."

Gordon's vitality and boldness kept her going for all of her 88 years, and given how long the entertainment industry still has to go towards accepting female aging, her singular screen presence continues to surprise and delight viewers of all ages.

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