Ruth Chatterton

Respected stage actress who made her screen debut in "Sins of the Fathers" (1928) and, at the relatively advanced age of 35, became a popular star of "women's films" of the early 1930s. An intense, often richly theatrical actress with a fine speaking voice, Chatterton enjoyed rewarding parts in such films as "Sarah and Son" (1930) and "Female" (1933). She played determined or high-powered women, often sexually quite liberated and aggressive, who undergo considerable emotional torment, and brought considerable class and dignity even to routine melodramatic romances. Her success in the first sound version of "Madame X" (1929) also insured that many of her later starring vehicles, such as "Frisco Jenny" (1933), would be variations of that film's glamorously suffering wife-and-mother role.

Although her stardom slipped after 1934, Chatterton came back to enjoy one of her finest roles, and the one for which she is best remembered, as Walter Huston's selfish and self-dramatizing wife, dreading the approach of middle age, in William Wyler's superb, beautifully acted adapatation of Sinclair Lewis' novel, "Dodsworth" (1936). Chatterton wrote a Broadway play in 1930 ("Monsieur Brotonneau") and, some time after retiring from films, published several popular novels in the 1950s. Married to actors Ralph Forbes, George Brent and Barry Thomson.