Ruth Chatterton

Chatterton was born in New York City on December 24, 1892 to Walter, an architect, and Lillian (née Reed) Chatterton. She was of English and French extraction. Her parents separated while she was young. Chatterton attended Mrs. Hagen's School in Pelham, New York.

In 1908, Chatterton and her friends were attending a play in Washington, D.C. Chatterton later criticized the acting of the lead actress to her friends, who challenged her to become a stage actress herself or "shut up". Chatterton accepted the challenge, and a few days later, joined the chorus of the stage show. She soon dropped out of school to pursue a stage career. Aged 16, Chatterton joined the Friend Stock Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she remained for six months. In 1911, Chatterton made her Broadway stage debut in The Great Name. Her greatest success onstage came in 1914, when she starred in the play Daddy Long Legs, adapted from the novel by Jean Webster.

Chatterton married her first husband, actor Ralph Forbes, on December 19, 1924, in Manhattan. They moved to Los Angeles. With the help of Emil Jannings, she was cast in her first film role in Sins of the Fathers in 1928. That same year, she was signed to a contract by Paramount Pictures. Chatterton's first film for Paramount was also her first sound film, The Doctor's Secret, released in 1929. Chatterton was able to make the transition from silents to sound because of her stage experience.

Later in 1929, Chatterton was loaned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she starred in Madame X. The film was a critical and box-office success, and effectively launched Chatterton's career. For her work in the film, Chatterton received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress. The following year, she starred in Sarah and Son, portraying an impoverished housewife who rises to fame and fortune as an opera singer. The film was another critical and financial success, and Chatterton received a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Later that year, Chatterton was voted the second female star of the year, behind only Norma Shearer, in a poll conducted by the West Coast film exhibitors.

In 1933, Chatterton starred in the successful Pre-Code comedy-drama Female, in which she plays the head of an automobile factory who uses handsome men in her employ for sex and then drops them. When she left Paramount Pictures, her initial home studio, for Warner Bros., along with Kay Francis and William Powell, the brothers Warner were said to then need an infusion of "class". Chatterton's last picture for Warner Brothers was the 1934 drama Journal of a Crime, co-starring Adolphe Menjou and Claire Dodd. In this late pre-Coder, Chatterton plays a jealous wife who murders her husband's mistress. Chatterton is well-remembered for the types of roles that came to an end with implementation of the Production Code in July 1934, but she went on to co-star in the film Dodsworth (1936), for Samuel Goldwyn. This is widely regarded as her finest film, with what many considered an Oscar-worthy performance, although she was not nominated. Due to her age and the studios' focus on younger, more bankable stars, she moved to England and made only two more pictures, ending with A Royal Divorce (1938). She came back in 1948 to do television until 1953.