Chatterton, Ruth

Chatterton, Ruth (1893–1961), actress. A petite beauty, noted for the “exquisite naturalness” of her acting, she was born in New York City and made her stage debut in Washington, D.C., in 1909. For the next several years she played in stock there, in Milwaukee, and in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her first New York appearance was in a short‐lived failure, The Great Name (1911) but, coming under the aegis of Henry Miller, she won her earliest important notices as the daughter who reconciles her mother and father in The Rainbow (1912). Chatterton shone as the orphan Judy Abbott in Daddy Long‐Legs (1914), the disguised Olive Daingerfield in Come Out of the Kitchen (1916), the much‐wooed Judith Baldwin in Moonlight and Honeysuckle (1919), James M. Barrie's heroine Mary Rose (1920), a playwright's mistress Marthe Dellieres in La Tendresse (1922), and the switched wife Kay Faber in The Changelings (1923). Chatterton then suffered a series of failures in New York, so she spent most of the ensuing years in films, returning to the theatre intermittently though never with a major success. Her last New York appearance was as Irene in a 1951 City Center revival of Idiot's Delight.