Ruth Terry

Ruth Terry was born Ruth McMahon in Benton Harbor, Michigan, in 1920. She got her start in show business as a child when she would sing with the band in a dance hall where her father worked as a bouncer. She began entering amateur talent contests in the local area, and her beautiful singing voice resulted in her winning many of them. When she was in fourth grade her parents decided that she would embark on a professional singing career, and to that end took her out of school (her education continued with private teachers). She kept winning talent contests, and later became part of a vaudeville act called The Capps Family and Ruthie Mae. She eventually won a spot singing on a Chicago radio station, then she got her own 15-minute time slot on a station in South Bend, Indiana. At 12 years of age she won a contract to sing with a prestigious Chicago musical group, The Paul Ash Chicago Theater Orchestra. After that engagement she went to New York and got a job as a song plugger for composer Irving Berlin, who was a friend of her aunt's. She eventually got her own nightclub act--changing her name to Ruth Terry at the suggestion of gossip columnist Walter Winchell--and soon headed to Miami, where she was engaged to sing at several prestigious nightspots and hotels, and while there she was spotted by talent scouts from 20th Century-Fox. In 1937 she was playing in Chicago with bandleader Ted Lewis when Fox offered her a contract--and all this while she was barely 16 years old. She was brought to Hollywood by Fox and given diction and acting lessons, and the studio soon put her in her first picture, International Settlement (1938), although she only had one line. She stayed with Fox for two more years, until she was dropped in 1939. In 1940 she was signed by Howard Hughes, who eventually sold her contract to Republic Pictures. It was at Republic where she began making westerns, a genre in which she would spend a lot of time. She made westerns with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Robert Livingston, among others. Her contract with Republic ended in 1947, and she made only one other film, for Columbia, before retiring. She soon married, for a second time, and she and her husband moved to Canada. The marriage ended in 1957, and she moved back to the US. In 1962, as a favor to a friend, she did a small part in a low-budget horror film, Hand of Death (1962).