The Ruth Gordon that America cherished for almost three-quarters of a century began in 1911 at the Colonial Theater in Boston. Miss Gordon was fond of telling the story, and, along with so many of her stories, it could serve as an inspiration to all aspiring young actresses. Hazel Dawn was playing in ''The Pink Lady,'' and sitting in the Colonial balcony was Ruth Gordon Jones from Quincy, Mass. She saw Miss Dawn - and she loved her - and she also heard ''my voices.'' As Miss Gordon recalled, about those voices, ''Joan heard hers at Domremy, mine came through at the corner of Boylston and Tremont, Boston, Mass. My voices said go on stage, Ruth, go on stage! Be an actress!''
Miss Gordon was never one to disregard a good suggestion, and, taking the ethereal advice, she plunged into a career that was to carry her to the top of several professions. At first, it was not easy - actually, it never was easy. She was not beautiful or glamorous and had neither the voice nor the stature for tragedy. She was also totally without experience and connections in the business. What she had was determination - in Miss Gordon's case, a far more apt word than ambition.
Most of all, she desperately wanted to be an actress and, for her, being an actress did not mean waiting to be discovered but seizing every opportunity and disregarding every discouragement. From her Broadway debut in 1915 as Nibs in ''Peter Pan,'' until her death Aug. 28 at 88, she never stopped working.
In fact, when she died she still had four movies to be released. When she was not acting, she was writing - stage plays, screenplays in collaboration with her husband Garson Kanin and memoirs. Most important, she was being Ruth Gordon, which was a calling unto itself.
Though Miss Gordon acted in plays by Shaw long before she did ''Mrs. Warren's Profession'' at Lincoln Center, she never took the time to distinguish herself in classics, except for a brief two-year flourish in the late 1930's. In quick order, she played Mattie Silver in ''Ethan Frome,'' Mrs. Pinchwife in ''The Country Wife'' (both at the Old Vic and on Broadway) and, to top it all off, Nora in ''A Doll's House'' in an adaptation by her friend Thornton Wilder. Opening night of ''A Doll's House'' was, she said, ''the absolute peak of my career. I went to bed with the highest heart in the whole world.''
For reasons that have more to do with the limitations of the American theater than with her talent, she did not play many of the roles she was capable of playing. Had she been English, she might have gone on to become an Edith Evans or a Peggy Ashcroft. There were of course several individual triumphs - her Natasha in ''The Three Sisters,'' her definitive Dolly Levi in ''The Matchmaker'' (the first time I saw her perform on stage). But in recent decades her appearances in plays were fleeting, or at least the plays were fleeting. One remembers vividly her mother in Lillian Hellman's savage but anarchic comedy, ''My Mother, My Father and Me.'' One wished that Miss Gordon, as dramatist, could have done a rewrite on that play.
In what could be called her middle period, the roles that suited her did not exist in abundance, and she was apparently aware of her own acting range. Because she was brilliant as Nora did not mean she should do Hedda Gabler. Her Serena Blandish did not qualify her for Lady Macbeth. As an actress - on film as on stage - she was at her finest in comedy. That is not to say she was a comedienne, though detractors might have regarded her as such. What she did was character comedy, and it is our loss not to have seen her in Sheridan and Goldsmith as well as Christopher Durang. Her comic style came to be so definable as to be idiosyncratic. She was a great personality actress.
Miss Gordon attacked her own writing with the same persistence and dedication she brought to acting. Every time you enjoy Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn sparring in ''Adam's Rib'' and ''Pat and Mike,'' remember who created their characters and wrote their witty dialogue. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin's contribution to the symbiosis of the Tracy-Hepburn team is inestimable.
There were two other important aspects to Miss Gordon's writing career, the first as a playwright. On the Gordon scale of productivity, her playwriting was a minor element - by my count, three original plays, one adaptation and one play that never reached fruition - but at least two plays, ''Over Twenty-One'' and ''Years Ago'' bear reconsideration. It was clear from a recent viewing of the film version of her youthful memoir, ''Years Ago,'' called ''The Actress'' (starring Spencer Tracy as the father and Jean Simmons as the daughter) that this is an endearing romantic comedy of adolescent longing. With all the unearthing of early Philip Barry and George Kelly, it is time that the theater looked again at early Ruth Gordon. Her books included, most notably, ''My Side,'' an exhilarating non-stop monologue as memoir. Reading it, any part of it, one can hear the ineffable Gordon voice.
Her talk, in person as in print, was a play unto itself. Last year, in one of many honors that seemed to strike her weekly from the time she became an octogenarian, the Players Club toasted her with an evening. After all the testimonials from her admiring peers, she took center stage and told, with variations, the story of how she left Quincy for the Never-Never Land of Broadway, how doors were slammed in her face (she opened them), how critics were scathing (she ignored them), how she survived and, finally, thrived. Self-taught and self-made, she learned about life and learned about theater. She created herself as an actress. As she told her story, it was evident that if there ever were a solo performance artist, it was Ruth Gordon.
I regret that I missed most of her greatest stage performances, but, along with others, I was to rediscover her as a character actress in the movies. I am not exactly sure how that career began, but, in a swarm, she made scores of movies, ''Rosemary's Baby,'' ''Where's Poppa?,'' ''Harold and Maude,'' and became a cult star. How many First Ladies of the theater can make that claim -and make no mistake, even without playing Medea, she was a First Lady of several stages.
Fifty-three years after the American Academy of Dramatic Arts dismissed her from its ranks for showing no promise, the organization honored her. She addressed the graduating class: ''The last time I was at the Academy, the president said, 'We feel you're not suited to acting. Don't come back.' Well, you see who's standing here. And on that awful day when someone says you're not pretty, you're no good, think of me and don't give up!'' When, at 72, she won an Academy Award for ''Rosemary's Baby,'' she said, ''I can't tell you how encouraging a thing like this is.'' She meant it.
I recall traveling with the Kanins to Quincy for a citywide celebration on Miss Gordon's 80th birthday. Thanking her hometown, she reminisced about her birth, then laughed and corrected herself. Her memory began, she confessed, when she was four. ''That was 1900 and I got organized. I knew I was going to have the damndest great things happen to me.'' At her death, friends referred to a light going out. Actually, an entire theatrical galaxy has been extinguished. As she once said, ''If you live long enough, you are your work and your work is you.'' The memories of stage performances, the movies, screenplays, plays and books and, most of all, her life as theater, endure.
© The New York Times