Ruth Chatterton (December 24, 1892 – November 24, 1961) was an American stage, film, and television actress, aviator and novelist.

Her greatest success onstage came in 1914, when she starred in the play Daddy Long Legs, adapted from the novel by Jean Webster.

[7] The following year, she starred in Sarah and Son, portraying an impoverished housewife who rises to fame and fortune as an opera singer.

[6] In 1933, Chatterton starred in the successful Pre-Code comedy-drama Female, in which she plays the head of an automobile factory who uses handsome men in her employ for sex and then drops them.

Chatterton's last picture for Warner Brothers was the 1934 drama Journal of a Crime, co-starring Adolphe Menjou and Claire Dodd.

Chatterton is well-remembered for the types of roles that came to an end with implementation of the Production Code in July 1934, but she went on to co-star in the film Dodsworth (1936), for Samuel Goldwyn.

Due to her age and the studios' focus on younger, more bankable stars, she moved to England and made only two more pictures, ending with A Royal Divorce (1938).

In 1947 she narrated a four-sided 78 rpm disc set, The Revolt of the Alphabet, written by John Byrne, with music by Vladimir Selinsky.

[9] Chatterton came out of retirement in the 1950s, and appeared on U.S. television in several plays, including a TV adaptation of Dodsworth on Prudential Playhouse, alongside Mary Astor and Walter Huston.

[10] Her last television appearance was as Gertrude in a 1953 adaptation of Hamlet, with Maurice Evans in the title role, on the anthology series Hallmark Hall of Fame.

[13][14] She taught British film and stage actor Brian Aherne to fly, an experience he described at length in his 1969 autobiography A Proper Job.

In 1924, she married British actor Ralph Forbes, who starred opposite her that same year in The Magnolia Lady, a musical version of the A.E.