She was a favorite of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, and made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.

This led to additional leading roles which raised her profile, such as Night Nurse (1931), Baby Face (1933), and the controversial The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).

She received her second Academy Award nomination for Ball of Fire, and in the decades since its release The Lady Eve has come to be regarded as a comedic classic, with Stanwyck's performance called one of the best in American comedy.

She starred with Fred MacMurray in the seminal film noir Double Indemnity (1944), playing the wife who persuades an insurance salesman to kill her husband, for which she received her third Oscar nomination.

Stanwyck's film career declined by the start of the 1950s, despite having a fair number of leading and major supporting roles in the decade, the most successful being Executive Suite (1954).

She transitioned to television by the 1960s, where she won three Emmy Awards, for The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1961), the Western series The Big Valley (1966), and the miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983).

[15] Ruby's next job was as a typist for the Jerome H. Remick Music Company; she reportedly enjoyed the work, but her continuing ambition was show business, and her sister finally gave up trying to dissuade her.

Arthur Hopkins described in his autobiography To a Lonely Boy, how he came to cast Stanwyck: After some search for the girl, I interviewed a nightclub dancer who had just scored in a small emotional part in a play that did not run [The Noose].

In Edna Ferber's novel brought to screen by William Wellman, she portrays small town teacher and valiant Midwest farm woman Selena in So Big!

[35] In The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), another controversial pre-Code film by director Capra, Stanwyck portrays an idealistic Christian caught behind the lines of Chinese civil war kidnapped by warlord Nils Asther.

A flop at the time, though it received some critical success,[36] the lavish film is "dark stuff, and it's difficult to imagine another actress handling this ... philosophical conversion as fearlessly as Ms. Stanwyck does.

Stanwyck then played nightclub performer Sugarpuss O'Shea in the Howard Hawks directed, but Billy Wilder written comedy Ball of Fire (1941).

In this update of the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs tale, she gives professor Bertram Potts (played by Gary Cooper) a better understanding of "modern English" in the performance for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

[47]In Double Indemnity (1944), the seminal film noir thriller directed by Billy Wilder, she plays the sizzling blonde tramp[48]/"destiny in high heels"[49] who lures an infatuated insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray), into killing her husband.

[48] Stanwyck brings out the cruel nature of the "grim, unflinching murderess", marking her as the "most notorious femme fatale" in the film noir genre.

[51][52] She plays a columnist touted as the "greatest cook in the country" caught up in white lies while trying to pursue a romance in the comedy Christmas in Connecticut (1945).

[55][56] Stanwyck was also the vulnerable, invalid wife that overhears her own murder being plotted in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)[57] and the doomed concert pianist in The Other Love (1947).

[58] Pauline Kael, a longtime film critic for The New Yorker, admired the natural appearance of Stanwyck's acting style on screen, noting that she "seems to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera".

[59] In reference to the actress's film work during the early sound era, Kael observed that the "[e]arly talkies sentimentality ... only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism.

"[60] While working on 1954's Cattle Queen of Montana (also starring Ronald Reagan) on location in Glacier National Park, she performed some of her own stunts, including a swim in the icy lake.

In 1958, she guest-starred in "Trail to Nowhere", an episode of the Western anthology series Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, playing a wife who kills a man to avenge her husband.

[23] She was billed in the series' opening credits as Miss Barbara Stanwyck for her role as Victoria, the widowed matriarch of the wealthy Barkley family.

[23] In 1985, she made three guest appearances in the primetime soap opera Dynasty prior to the launch of its short-lived spinoff series The Colbys, in which she starred alongside Charlton Heston, Stephanie Beacham and Katharine Ross.

Stanwyck served as support and adviser to the younger Taylor, who had come from a small Nebraska town; she guided his career and acclimated him to the sophisticated Hollywood culture.

[76][77] Stanwyck and Taylor enjoyed time together outdoors during the early years of their marriage and owned acres of prime West Los Angeles property.

[79] There have been many rumors regarding the cause of the divorce, but after World War II Taylor attempted to create a life away from the entertainment industry, and Stanwyck did not share that goal.

[81] Stanwyck was one of the best-liked actresses in Hollywood and maintained friendships with many of her fellow actors (as well as crew members of her films and TV shows), including Joel McCrea and his wife Frances Dee, George Brent, Robert Preston, Henry Fonda (who had a longtime crush on her),[82][83] James Stewart, Linda Evans, Joan Crawford, Jack Benny and his wife Mary Livingstone, William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Fred MacMurray.

[citation needed] In 1981, in her home in the exclusive Trousdale section of Beverly Hills, she was awakened during the night by an intruder who struck her on the head with his flashlight, forced her into a closet, and absconded with $40,000 in jewels.

[99] In 1982, while filming The Thorn Birds, Stanwyck inhaled special-effects smoke on the set that may have caused her to contract bronchitis, which was compounded by her cigarette-smoking habit.

[100] Stanwyck died on January 20, 1990, at the age of 82, from congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California.