Wesley Ruggles
Directing
Born 1889-06-10
Died 1972-01-08
Los Angeles, California, USA
82 credits
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Wesley Ruggles (June 11, 1889 – January 8, 1972) was an American film director.
He was born in Los Angeles, a younger brother of actor Charles Ruggles. He began his career in 1915 as an actor, appearing in a dozen or so silent films, on occasion with Charles Chaplin.
In 1917, he turned his attention to directing, making more than 50 mostly forgettable films — including a silent film version of Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence (1924) — before he won acclaim with Cimarron in 1931. The adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel Cimarron, about homesteaders settling in the prairies of Oklahoma, was the first Western to win an Academy Award as Best Picture.
Although Ruggles followed this success with the light comedy No Man of Her Own (1932) with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, the comedy I'm No Angel (1933) with Mae West and Cary Grant , College Humor (1933) with Bing Crosby, and Bolero (1934) with George Raft and Carole Lombard, few of his later films were in any way memorable (an exception is Arizona).
His career was on the downslide when he teamed with the Rank Organisation in 1946 to produce and direct London Town with Sid Field and Petula Clark, based on a story he wrote. The film — British cinema's first attempt at a Technicolor musical extravaganza — is notable as being one of the biggest critical and commercial failures in that country's film history. Ironically, Ruggles had been hired to helm it because as an American, it was thought, he was better equipped to handle a musical — despite the fact that nothing in his past had prepared him to work in the genre. It was his last film. An abridged version was released in the U.S. under the title My Heart Goes Crazy by United Artists in 1953.
Ruggles died in 1972 in Santa Monica and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Wesley Ruggles, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
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Filmography
— top 60 of 82
Directing
45 credits
I'm No Angel
Cimarron
See Here, Private Hargrove
College Humor
Slightly Dangerous
Arizona
I Met Him in Paris
Somewhere I'll Find You
Invitation to Happiness
No Man of Her Own
Mississippi
For France
Silk Stockings
The Gilded Lily
Too Many Husbands
You Belong to Me
True Confession
Shoot the Works
The Plastic Age
Hooked at the Altar
Bolero
Valiant Is the Word for Carrie
Condemned!
The Remittance Woman
The Age of Innocence
Roar of the Dragon
The Desperate Hero
Street Girl
A Man of Quality
Wild Honey
The Bride Comes Home
Are These Our Children?
Accent on Youth
The Monkey's Paw
London Town
Slippy McGee
Girl Overboard
Beware of Widows
The Heart Raider
The Fourflusher
Piccadilly Jim
Honey
The Sea Bat
Uncharted Seas
Over the Wire
Acting
14 credits
Shanghaied
Police
Triple Trouble
Her Torpedoed Love
The Pawnshop
The Plastic Age
Behind the Screen
A Night in the Show
A Lover's Lost Control
The Floorwalker
Beatrice Fairfax
Her Painted Hero
A Trip Through the World's Greatest Motion Picture Studios
Gussle's Wayward Path
Producing
12 credits
The Incredible World of James Bond
Cimarron
Arizona
I Met Him in Paris
Invitation to Happiness
Too Many Husbands
You Belong to Me
Valiant Is the Word for Carrie
Street Girl
The Bride Comes Home
London Town
The Sea Bat
Writing
2 credits
Other credits
1 credit
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