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Ruth Ford had been a photographer's model and stock actress before she was hired for Orson Welles's Mercury Theater in 1938. Ford enjoyed sizeable roles in the Mercury stage productions of Shoemaker's Holiday and Danton's Death, and also appeared on Welles' weekly radio anthology. In 1942, she was signed by Warner Bros. and groomed as a standard ingenue in such forgettable film fare as The Gorilla Man (1942) and The Hidden Hand (1943). In 1945 she moved on to 20th Century-Fox where she appeared in Wilson as Woodrow Wilson's daughter Margaret. Returning to Broadway, Ford distinguished herself in the demanding works of such playwrights as Shakespeare, Aigust Strindberg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward Albee. Her favorite stage roles included Estelle in No Exit, Temple Drake in Requiem for a Nun and Lorraine in A Breeze from the Gulf. Among the handful of films in which she appeared after 1950 were Act One (1963, as Beatrice Kaufman) and Play It As It Lays (1972). Previously married to actor Peter Van Eyck, Ruth Ford later married Zachary Scott, whom she outlived.