Ruth Clifford
Acting
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ruth Clifford (February 17, 1900 – November 30, 1998) was an American actress of leading roles in silent films, whose career lasted from silent days into the television era. Clifford got work as an extra and began her career at 15 at Universal, in fairly substantial roles. She received her first film credit for her work in Behind the Lines (1916). By her mid-twenties, she was playing leads and second leads, including the role of Abraham Lincoln's lost love, Ann Rutledge, in The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln (1924). But sound pictures found her roles diminishing, and throughout the next three decades she played smaller and smaller parts. She was a favorite of director John Ford (they played bridge together), who used her in eight films, but rarely in substantial roles. She was also, for a time, the voice of Walt Disney's Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck. Clifford's obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted that she "became a prime source for historians of the silent screen era".
Known For
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
Sunset Boulevard
As a Civil War veteran spends years searching for a young niece captured by Indians, his motivation becomes increasingly questionable.
The Searchers
An American man returns to the village of his birth in Ireland, where he finds love and conflict.
The Quiet Man
The deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House causes murder and mayhem in an attempt to make the woman he loves a star.
The Phantom of the Opera
Three brothers stop off for a night in the town of Tombstone. The next morning they find one of their brothers dead and their cattle stolen. They decide to take revenge on the culprits.
My Darling Clementine
The life of famed 1930s comedienne Fanny Brice, from her early days in the Jewish slums of New York, to the height of her career with the Ziegfeld Follies, as well as her marriage to the rakish gambler Nick Arnstein.
Funny Girl
A socialite marries a prominent novelist, which spurs a violent, obsessive, and dangerous jealousy in her.
Leave Her to Heaven
Three outlaws on the run discover a dying woman and her baby. They swear to bring the infant to safety across the desert, even at the risk of their own lives.
3 Godfathers
Two tough westerners bring home a group of settlers who have spent years as Comanche hostages.
Two Rode Together
Lovely Linda Mason has crooner Jim Hardy head over heels, but suave stepper Ted Hanover wants her for his new dance partner after fickle Lila Dixon gives him the brush. Jim's supper club, Holiday Inn, is the setting for the chase by Hanover and his manager.
Holiday Inn
Two young horse traders guide a Mormon wagon train to the San Juan Valley and encounter rugged terrain, the cutthroat Clegg gang, hospitable Navajo, and moral challenges on the journey.
Wagon Master
A young priest, Father Chisholm is sent to China to establish a Catholic parish among the non-Christian Chinese. While his boyhood friend, also a priest, flourishes in his calling as a priest in a more Christian area of the world, Father Chisholm struggles. He encounters hostility, isolation, disease, poverty and a variety of set backs which humble him, but make him more determined than ever to succeed.
The Keys of the Kingdom
With a full Hollywood background and settings but more an expose of scandal-and-gossip magazines of the era, has-been actor John Blakeford agrees to write his memoirs for magazine-publisher Jordan Winston. When Blakeford's daughter, Patricia, ask him to desist for the sake of his ex-wife, Carlotta Blakeford, he attempts to break his contract with Winston.
Hollywood Boulevard
Band leader Jack Conrad is impressed by prison inmate Ray Ferrera on saxophone. Conrad hires Ray to join his band and tour upon his release. Ray hooks up with Jean, a dancer in the show, and the two become a successful dance act. However, when an ex-inmate buddy of Ray's robs the tour bus, Ray is suspected of wrongdoing by Jack and the others in the group. After a gang of thugs hijacks the tour bus, Ray tries to use his street smarts to redeem his reputation.
Stolen Harmony
A group of academics have spent years shut up in a house working on the definitive encyclopedia. When one of them discovers that his entry on slang is hopelessly outdated, he ventures into the wide world to learn about the evolving language. Here he meets Sugarpuss O’Shea, a nightclub singer, who’s on top of all the slang—and, it just so happens, needs a place to stay.
Ball of Fire
In Victorian era London, the inhabitants of a family home with rented rooms upstairs fear the new lodger is Jack the Ripper.
The Lodger
Respected black cavalry Sergeant Brax Rutledge stands court-martial for raping and killing a white woman and murdering her father, his superior officer.
Sergeant Rutledge
Albany, New York, 1776. After marrying, Gil and Lana travel north to settle on a small farm in the Mohawk River Valley, but soon their growing prosperity and happiness are threatened by the sinister sound of drums that announce dark times of revolution and war.
Drums Along the Mohawk
The wife of a psychoanalyst falls prey to a devious quack hypnotist when he discovers she is an habitual shoplifter. Then one of his previous patients now being treated by the real doctor is found murdered, with her still at the scene, and suspicion points only one way.
Whirlpool
Alice Faye plays the title role in this 1940 film biography of the early-20th-century stage star.