"Ruby Stevens was only 2 when her mother died after falling and hitting her head on a Brooklyn curbside; soon after, her father left to work on the Panama Canal, never to be heard from again. She was shunted from friends to relatives and back, each move stiffening her upper lip and glazing her over with another coating of protective shell. The adult Stanwyck, a blunt talker and rigid right-winger, was all brisk, efficient business, with a survivor’s compulsion for losing herself in work and a loner’s unease at being the center of attention. She made 88 films over 38 years. The worst are tolerable for her presence in them, and if the best include some of Hollywood’s finest, it’s often only partly, if no less surely, because of her."
In the LA Weekly, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert looks back at the life and career of Barbara Stanwyck.
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