Its a Wonderful Life Actress Was 97 The Hollywood Reporter Aumag The Talks Today

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Actress Was 97 – The Hollywood Reporter – Aumag

Virginia Patton, who portrayed Ruth Dakin Bailey, sister-in-law of Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, in the Frank Capra holiday classic It’s a wonderful life, is dead. She was 97.

Patton died Thursday at a nursing home in Albany, Georgia, Mathews Funeral Home announced.

Patton’s character in the 1946 film was married to Harry Bailey (Todd Karns), and her big scene takes place at the Bedford Falls train station when she meets George and Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) for the first time.

As crew members lit her scene — filmed at the Santa Fe Railroad’s now-defunct Lamanda Park station in Pasadena — with her stand-in, she wondered how she was going to eat her buttered popcorn while wearing white gloves.

“I was dressed as a young matron. I had a hat, a suit and white gloves, I came to meet my new in-laws,” she recalled in 2016. “And I had to eat buttered popcorn with white gloves?

“We rehearsed it and Frank didn’t say anything about it, his assistant didn’t say anything about it, the cameraman didn’t say anything about it. I sat there, ‘What am I going to do? I’m going to have popcorn over those gloves.’ … I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to pretend that everybody’s eating buttered popcorn with gloves on, and they’re all getting butter on them.’

Virginia Ann Patton was born in Cleveland on June 25, 1925. She was raised in Portland, Oregon, where she graduated from Jefferson High School in 1942, then went to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

She signed a contract with Warner Bros., made her film debut in the musical Thank your lucky stars (1943), starring Eddie Cantor and an all-star cast, and appeared in small roles in other films, including Janie (1944), Hollywood canteen (1944) and Jack Benny’s The horn blows at midnight (1945).

A niece of World War II General George Patton, she had starred in a play written by William C. De Mille, brother of Cecil B. De Mille, while attending USC, and that put her on Capra’s radar. He cast It’s a wonderful lifethe first film he would make for his new Liberty Films production company.

“I read for him and he signed me,” she said in 2013, adding that she was “the only girl he ever signed in his entire career.” Her contract at Warners had expired, and all the other adult cast members would be working on loan from other studios.

From left: Todd Karns, Virginia Patton, Jimmy Stewart and Thomas Mitchell in 1946’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

Courtesy Everett Collection

Since It’s a wonderful life has broadcast several times each year around Christmas for decades, Patton often joked that “I’ve probably been to more homes than even Santa Claus.”

Patton had the female lead The burning cross (1947), a film about the Ku Klux Klan, and Black Eagle (1948), a western, then retired from acting after a supporting objection The Lucky Stiff (1949).

She left Hollywood and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, after marrying auto executive Cruse W. Moss in 1949, and they had three children. They were married for 69 years until his death in 2018.

Patton served as an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art and president and CEO of Patton Corp., an investment and real estate holding company.

In a 2012 interview, Patton noted that Capra asked her to think twice about giving up show business, but she said she was comfortable with her decision.

“I have a beautiful letter [Capra] wrote me because I kept in touch with him,” she said. “He wrote: ‘I just knew you were going to be a wonderful mother with three little bambinos and a wonderful husband.’”

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