Elizabeth Ashley is a stage actor first and has spent a screen career since 1964 in other people's supporting casts, playing strong, outspoken women from feeling rather than intellect. In Russian Doll she found the part that used all of it.
Fi1m perspective
In Russian Doll (2019), Natasha Lyonne's Nadia dies at her own birthday party and comes back, over and over, and would plainly rather keep dying than let anyone look after her. The exception is Ruth Brenner, the therapist who took her in as a child when her mother could not cope. Elizabeth Ashley plays Ruth as the warmest thing in a show that is otherwise all elbows, and whenever the story goes to Ruth's flat it stops guarding itself. We felt the temperature of the whole series change in those scenes, and it was Ashley doing it, sitting still and letting Nadia be difficult at her. It is a supporting part. It is also why we remember the show as kind.
That warmth arrived at the end of a long road, most of it on stage. Ashley began on Broadway at the turn of the 1960s, in Take Her, She's Mine (1962) and Barefoot in the Park (1963), and the theatre has been her home ground ever since. Her film debut was The Carpetbaggers (1964), and what followed was decades of supporting roles rather than a screen career with a shape: Coma (1978), Happiness (1998), Ocean's Eight (2018), four films with Burt Reynolds and, on television, Evening Shade (1990–1994) as Freida Evans. The serious work went to the stage, and it was Tennessee Williams who brought her back to prominence there: Maggie in the 1974 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and later Amanda Wingfield. We cannot judge performances we did not see, but the parts tell you what kind of actor the cinema kept in its second rank.
What she does is a recognisable thing. The roles are strong, outspoken, often Southern, often somebody's mother, and she plays them from feeling rather than from the head. By her own account she has "always been good at the going nuts part", and for fifty years that is mostly what she was asked for. Ruth Brenner asks for the opposite: patience, quiet, a woman who will not be provoked however hard Nadia tries. That she is as good at the quiet as at the noise is the surprise of her late work, and it makes us wonder how many quiet parts went to other people in the meantime.
If you know her only as Ruth, start there and work backwards. The film list is a scattering of good turns in other people's pictures, and the fullest account of what she can do was given in theatres we cannot point you to. For an actor of her kind, that is roughly as it should be.
Biography
Elizabeth Ashley, born Elizabeth Ann Cole, is an American actress of theatre, film and television. She trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and made her Broadway debut in the late 1950s. In 1962 she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in Take Her, She's Mine.
Ashley appeared in films including The Carpetbaggers (1964) and Ocean's Eight (2018). On television she has had recurring or guest roles in series such as Evening Shade, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Hey Arnold!. She played Ruth Brenner in the Netflix series Russian Doll (2019–2022).
