📍22 Chester Street, Lowell, MA 01850
1908 – 1926“I was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1908, the daughter of Harlow Davis, a lawyer, and Ruth Favor, a photographer. My parents divorced when I was seven and my mother supported my sister and me through portrait photography — a woman working independently in the early twentieth century, which modelled for me the possibility of professional self-determination. I was not a conventional beauty and I knew it early, which turned out to be useful: I had to become a great actress rather than a beautiful one. Lowell was a New England mill city, serious and Protestant, and it gave me the work ethic and stubbornness that Hollywood found alternately impressive and infuriating.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Stine, W. Mother Goddam (1974), Hawthorn Books; Davis, B. The Lonely Life (1962), Putnam