Eleanor Ruggles (1916–2008)

Eleanor Ruggles was born in Boston, Massachusetts, a daughter of Daniel Blaisdell Ruggles, a judge on the Nantucket circuit, and his wife Alice Morrill Ruggles. She grew up in the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Beacon Hill, and attended the Winsor School. In 1938, she earned a bachelor's degree in English and theater arts from Vassar College, where she acted in school plays and wrote for campus publications. After graduation, she moved to London and took acting lessons from drama coach Elsie Fogerty, before turning to the USA on the advent of World War II. She worked for a time with the Group 20 Theater and the Theater Guild of New York City and in the offices of the Players Club, and became the director of the Duchess County Players. During this period, she met young stars and playwrights such as Franchot Tone, John Garfield, Clifford Odets, and Orson Welles. However, she gave up her theater career when she married Robert Semmes O'Leary, then a Harvard University assistant professor and later an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, and moved with him to Cambridge. She began writing biographies with Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, published in 1945. It was followed by Journey Into Faith, about Cardinal John Henry Newman (1948) and The West Going Heart (1959), on the poet Vachal Lindsay. Her fascination with the theater led to writing Prince of Players: Edwin Booth (1953), based on years of research, and it became her greatest success. It was adapted into a film just two years later, starring Richard Burton, under the title King of Actors. Eleanor also worked as a book critic for the Boston Globe during the 1960s and 1970s.