Trusted to Write for the Greatest Stars of the Silent Screen: The Screenwriting Career of Ruth Cummings

Though born in 1894 Washington D.C., the family business was theatre, not the politics of President Grover Cleveland’s administration.  With an actor for a father - Henry Dupree Sinclair – the future Ruth Sinclair would also begin her career on the stage before turning to film where she wrote for silent stars such as Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.

Sinclair earned early roles in plays in her hometown but hit Broadway at the age of 19 in Madam President (Sep 15, 1913 - Jan 3, 1914). The four-month run at the Garrick Theatre which was later owned by the Shubert Organization and then the Theatre Guild, until it was razed in 1932, brought her to the attention of producer David Belasco. He cast her in Zaza (1915) and she appeared in 6 other films through 1922 when she wrote her first screenplay, The Man From Hell’s River. 

Sinclair co-wrote that first film about the Canadian Royal Mounted Police with film actor-director Irving Cummings who she married in 1917, thereby becoming Ruth Cummings. As with many women who begin a career with one name and continue it after changing their name through marriage, it can make researching them difficult. As a couple they then co-wrote Environment about the rehabilitation of "Chicago Sal" which didn’t go as planned, making for more interesting conflict in the film. 

Irving moved more into directing, so by 1925 Cummings was credited alongside Marian Ainslee with writing the title cards for popular novels La Bohème and Bardelys the Magnificent - adapted by Dorothy Farnum.  By 1927 she and Ainslee were fully adapting The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg for Ramon Navarro and Norma Shearer. That year Cummings co-wrote Annie Laurie for Lillian Gish with Josephine Lovett and Ainslee. 

Cummings wrote four more films in 1927 including Love which reunited on again/off again silent screen lovers Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.  With frequent co-writer Ainslee she adapted Tolstoy's 19th-century novel, Anna Karenina and the studio changed the title so they could advertise it as "Garbo and Gilbert in Love”.  This places Cummings among the highest respected screenwriters of the Silent Era yet she is sometimes utilized merely to write titles for films and not for the full adaptation.  That was the case for another Garbo vehicle, 1928’s The Mysterious Lady. This adaptation is credited to Bess Meredyth with titles credited to Cummings and Ainslee. Along with Alice G. Miller, Cummings and Ainslee tackled another largely successful adaptation, that of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning  book by Thornton Wilder it tells the story of several people who die in a rope bridge collapse in Peru, and the random events that lead up to their being on the bridge.

She toggled between the two screenwriting jobs during 1928.  Cummings work for Garbo made her and Ainslee, and in this case Josephine Lovett the best choices to write the film that made Joan Crawford a star, Our Dancing Daughters. It also brought the flapper character to the screen and therefore into the popular culture canon for all time. 

That same year she and Ainslee adapted a Michael Arlen novel into A Woman of Affairs, starring Garbo and Gilbert again though she returned to titles for Gilbert’s solo starring role in Desert Nights.  That film has the distinction of being his last successful silent film as his foray into Talkies would not work as well. Likewise, Cummings writes only one film a year as the industry moves into that era.  Her last credit before retirement is The Perfect Tribute which reenacts the build up to President Lincoln’s writing and delivering the Gettysburg Address, so in a way she returned to the political focus of her hometown. 

She lost Irving in 1959.  Their son, Irving Cummings Jr. (born 1918) had joined the family business, too, by writing films in the 1940s and television in the 1950s.  Ruth Cummings died just shy of her 100^th year on December 6, 1984, in Woodland Hills, California, likely while living in retirement at Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Wasserman Campus. Known colloquially as the Actors Home it would have been partially funded by her own work.

If you’d like to learn more about the history of women of women in screenwriting, and about the craft of screenwriting while earning your MFA from your own home, our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is currently accepting applications: https://stephens.edu/program/master-of-fine-arts-in-tv-screenwriting/