Barbara Stanwyck's Real Name: Ruby Stevens

Quick answer: Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, New York, on July 16, 1907, according to the Los Angeles Times, UPI, and Encyclopaedia Britannica, which lists Ruby Stevens as her other name. One Library of Congress note gives the longer form Ruby Catherine Stevens. She took the stage name Barbara Stanwyck in the mid-1920s. She died on January 20, 1990, in Santa Monica, California, at 82.

Real name and early life

UPI says Ruby Stevens was the youngest of five children and was orphaned at the age of four. Britannica says her mother died and her father almost immediately abandoned the family. She was raised partly by an elder sister and partly in foster care. The LA Times says that sister, a chorus girl, boarded her with a series of families while touring.

She quit school at 13, the Times says, to wrap packages in a Brooklyn store, and taught herself to dance. Just after turning 15 she landed her first performing job, as part of a "living chandelier" in a Ziegfeld Follies number. By 1923 she was a chorus girl in a New York revue.

Career highlights

Her break came with Willard Mack's play The Noose. The LA Times says Mack rewrote the third act around her chorus-girl character, coached her day and night, and changed her name. Declaring that Ruby Stevens was "no name for a star," he scanned names on nearby playbills and came up with Barbara Stanwyck. Britannica notes another account crediting impresario David Belasco. The play ran on Broadway for nearly a year.

Britannica says her breakthrough on screen was Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure (1930). She made more than 80 films; the LA Times and UPI count 88. They included Baby Face, The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. She received four Academy Award nominations, for Stella Dallas, Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity, and Sorry, Wrong Number, and an honorary Oscar in 1982.

On television she won Emmys for The Barbara Stanwyck Show, for The Big Valley as the Barkley family matriarch, and for the 1983 miniseries The Thorn Birds, according to Britannica.

The Times says she married vaudevillian Frank Fay in 1928 and actor Robert Taylor in 1939; both marriages ended in divorce.

Death

The LA Times says she died of congestive heart failure on January 20, 1990, at St. John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. UPI says she had been hospitalized for several weeks.

Name notes for searchers

Stanwyck was a stage surname chosen from theater playbills, not a family name. Library of Congress records cross-reference her under Stevens, Ruby. Searches for Ruby Catherine Stevens also refer to her, though that middle name appears in only one library note.