Hussey, Ruth Carol

(b. 30 October 1911 in Providence, Rhode Island; d. 19 April 2005 in Newbury Park, California), film, stage, and television actress who primarily played witty, sophisticated professional women and strong, noble wives.

Hussey was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the second of the three children of George Richard Hussey and Julia Agnes (Corbett) Hussey, a homemaker. The Husseys were a prominent New England family with local ancestry dating back to the 1600s, and George Hussey was the president of Baird-North Co., a collective of goldsmiths and silversmiths. Julia Corbett had met her future husband when she worked for his father, the founder of Baird-North. Hussey’s father died in the 1918 flu pandemic, when she was just seven years old.

Hussey graduated with a PhB from Pembroke College, the women’s school at Brown University, in 1933. She then studied drama at the University of Michigan and performed in the Aimee Loomis Stock Company before returning to Providence and working as a fashion commentator for a year at the local radio station WPRO. After a stint with the Providence Players, she moved to New York City to pursue an acting career in earnest. She initially worked as a model at the famous Powers Agency and later joined the Wee and Leventhal Stock Company, with which she toured the country. In 1937 a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scout saw her in the production of Dead End and signed her to a five-year contract, which was later extended to eight years.

Hussey made her film debut in an uncredited role in the Spencer Tracy film The Big City (1937). Other small parts followed in films such as Madame X (1937), Man-Proof (1938), Rich Man, Poor Girl (1938), Judge Hardy’s Children (1938), and Within the Law (1939). By 1939 she had progressed to larger parts in better films, including Another Thin Man (1939), Blackmail (1939), and the classic The Women (1939). Hussey’s breakthrough year was 1940, when she worked in The Philadelphia Story, Susan and God, Northwest Passage, and Flight Command.

In The Philadelphia Story, Hussey played the role for which she is perhaps best remembered, that of Elizabeth Imbrie, James Stewart’s character’s photographer colleague and girlfriend. She displayed wry wit to great effect while also revealing underlying decency and wisdom, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Flight Command was an important film for Hussey for personal reasons, as the talent agent Charles Robert Longenecker saw her in that movie and immediately decided that he would marry her. They later met in person through mutual acquaintances and indeed married, on 9 August 1942, after a seven-week courtship. They would be married for sixty years, until Longenecker’s death on 10 December 2002. They had two sons and a daughter.

After her success in The Philadelphia Story, Hussey began playing leads, but the films were deemed by some to be unworthy of her talent. The notable exceptions were H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), Tennessee Johnson (1942), The Uninvited (1944), and The Great Gatsby (1949). Of those films, The Uninvited, one of the best ghost stories of the time period, is the movie for which Hussey became best known as years passed.

Returning to the stage, Hussey debuted on Broadway on 11 November 1945 alongside Ralph Bellamy in the popular Pulitzer Prize–winning play State of the Union. She played the female lead, Mary Matthews, the wife of a presidential candidate. Hussey returned to Broadway in 1948 to replace Madeleine Carroll in the lead in Goodbye, My Fancy. In the 1940s and 1950s she also performed in various productions by stock and touring companies, notably the New York City Center production of The Royal Family of Broadway in 1951. Around that time, Hussey began appearing in the new medium of television, in such shows as Climax!, Lux Video Theatre, Science Fiction Theatre, and Studio One. She was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1954. She appeared in fewer films in the 1950s; among them were Mr. Music (1950), Louisa (1950), and Stars and Stripes Forever (1952).

In 1950 Brown University awarded Hussey an honorary doctorate in fine arts. After her third child was born, in 1953, Hussey began to devote more time to her family and to personal interests. She painted watercolors; designed her family’s vacation home in Lake Arrowhead, California; and became active in various Catholic charities and in the American Heart Association. From the mid-1950s onward, Hussey performed only rarely, and her last feature-film role was as Bob Hope’s wife in The Facts of Life (1960). Hussey also did a voice-over for her son John Longenecker in his Academy Award–winning short film The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970). Hussey appeared on television several times in the 1970s, her last screen performance being with Robert Young in the 1973 made-for-television movie My Darling Daughter’s Anniversary. Around the same time, Hussey gave a series of local play readings with Allan Gruener in Southern California. Hussey died on 19 April 2005 at Mary Health of the Sick Convalescent and Nursing Hospital, in Newbury Park, California, from complications after an appendectomy. She was buried at an undisclosed location.

In all, Hussey appeared in about forty feature films. She was a beautiful brunette, standing about five feet, five inches tall, and a reliable actress who projected grace, poise, and intelligence. Those qualities made her a natural choice for the bright, witty, strong women she generally played, at a time in the history of American films when positive portrayals of such women were rare.

For biographical information on Hussey, see Richard Lamparski, Whatever Became of... ? Fourth Series (1973), which contains a section on Hussey; and Michelle Vogel, Children of Hollywood: Accounts of Growing Up as the Sons and Daughters of Stars (2005), which contains an interview with Hussey’s son John Longenecker. Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post (both 21 Apr. 2005) and in Variety (25 Apr. 2005).

Patricia L. Markley