Ruth Donnelly was the woman at the edge of the frame in thirties comedy: the acid secretary, the heroine's unimpressed friend, Guy Kibbee's long-suffering wife. It is a small trade, and she practised it for a quarter of a century better than most.
Fi1m perspective
The part is nearly always the same. Somebody at the centre of the frame is talking too much, and Ruth Donnelly, off to one side, is visibly not buying a word of it. In the thirties she was the wisecracking friend of the heroine, the sour secretary, the wife who has heard it all before, and the studios kept her at it from 1931 to 1957. She never carried a film. She was there so the people who did would have someone to be looked at by.
She came from the stage, a chorus girl in The Quaker Girl in 1913 at seventeen, then Broadway musicals including George M. Cohan's from 1917, and the training shows in the timing: the line lands on the beat and her face has already moved on. Four times she was married to Guy Kibbee, in Footlight Parade (1933) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) among them, and the pairing worked because he was all bluster and she played the person the bluster had been tried on every evening for thirty years. In A Slight Case of Murder (1938) she is Nora Marko opposite Edward G. Robinson, and the fast, dry back-talk there is what people meant when they called her reliable.
Capra used her twice. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) she is Mabel Dawson, a cynical colleague at the newspaper, there for comic counterpoint while Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur get on with the story. We admit to a small frustration watching her in it: she is exactly right for a line or two, and then Riskin's script has a sermon to deliver and she is gone. That is the character actor's contract, and she kept to it. Capra's ensembles are built out of people like her, faces that make a room feel populated in a single cut.
The dramatic parts came later and are worth knowing about. The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) cast her as Sister Michael, a worldly nun, and The Snake Pit (1948) put her among the asylum inmates. We have not reviewed either and will not judge them here, but they are the evidence that the sour secretary was a choice rather than a limit. She left films in 1957 and went back to the stage in the seventies, understudying and touring. The notices, then and since, have nothing bad to say about her, which is rarer than it sounds.
Nobody ever went to the cinema for Ruth Donnelly, and she appeared in more good films than many people who were gone for. Start with a Kibbee marriage. Watch what she does while he is talking.
Biography
Ruth Donnelly (1896–1982) was an American stage and film actress. She began her stage career at the age of 17 in the 1913 touring production of The Quaker Girl. Her Broadway debut led to comic-relief roles in musicals by George M. Cohan, including Going Up (1917).
Her Hollywood career began in earnest in 1931 and continued until 1957. She frequently appeared as the wife of Guy Kibbee, including in Footlight Parade (1933), Wonder Bar (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Other notable roles include Mabel Dawson in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Sister Michael in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) and Nora Marko in A Slight Case of Murder (1938).
Donnelly was married to Basil de Guichard from 1932 until his death in 1958.
