Ruth Ford (July 7, 1911 – August 12, 2009) was an American actress and model. Her brother was the bohemiansurrealistCharles Henri Ford. Their parents owned or managed hotels in the American South, and the family regularly moved.
Born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, Ford was the daughter of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford, who owned hotels in four towns in the South.[1] She was a graduate of the University of Mississippi.[2] Writer and artist Charles Henri Ford was her brother.[3]
She married actor Peter Van Eyck in 1940, but the marriage was unsuccessful.[1] Van Eyck was the father of her daughter, Shelley, who was born in 1941. Before Ford's trip to Hollywood, she was a member of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and appeared in his film Too Much Johnson (1938), which was considered lost until the rediscovery of footage in 2013.[4] Welles's assistance helped her to land contracts with Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. studios.[citation needed]
Ford's Broadway debut was in The Shoemaker's Holiday (1938). Among her other Broadway performances, she starred in Poor Murderer (1976).[5]
Ford married film star Zachary Scott, and they remained together until Scott's death in 1965. Scott adopted Shelley, who took the name Shelley Scott. Zachary Scott reportedly died penniless except for a $100,000 insurance policy he left for his widow. Later, in the 1970s, she was involved in a relationship with a much younger man, writer Dotson Rader.[6]
Ford, writing out Christmas cards by her courtyard window, was the first person to call 911 to report shots fired at The Dakota apartments after what turned out to be the murder of John Lennon.[citation needed]
In May 2010 it was reported, originally in The Wall Street Journal, that Ford's estate had been worth $8.4 million, almost all of it in the value of two apartments she owned in the apartment building The Dakota in Manhattan, where she died at the age of 98 in 2009. One of the apartments had belonged to her brother Charles, who predeceased her. She bequeathed the apartments to her cook/butler, Indra Tamang, a Nepalese-American whom Charles Henri Ford had brought to New York. Ford's daughter and grandchildren reportedly were disinherited.[7][8] Tamang sold the larger of Ford's Dakota apartments in 2011 for less than $4.5 million.[9]
