Virginia Bruce, Hollywood Horror Star and Horsewoman: Halloween Edition

Tobi Lopez Taylor

This essay is part of the ongoing Halloween Horror Horsewomen series, which also includes a profile of Martha O’Driscoll.  Future essays will focus on actresses Marguerite Churchill, Frances Drake, and Evelyn Ankers.

Just in time for Halloween🎃, here’s the story of another actress from the Golden Age of Universal horror films who also made her mark as a racehorse owner and breeder: Virginia Bruce (b. 1910, d. 1982). (Some of the information about Bruce included herein has been drawn from Scott O’Brien’s 2008 book, Virginia Bruce: Under My Skin, the only full-length biography of the actress.) 

Born in Minnesota as Helen Virginia Briggs, she attended high school in North Dakota and moved to Los Angeles with her family in 1928. One of her first film appearances was a bit part in the 1929 Fox Studios drama Fugitives, which starred Madge Bellamy—who also has a horse connection via a former lover she attempted to shoot:  Albert Stanwood Murphy (see my post on the matter here).

In 1932, Bruce worked alongside Walter Huston and Lupe Velez in the MGM horror drama Kongo. One reviewer remarked in Photoplay, “Walter Huston in a role unsuited to his personality; Lupe Velez with little chance to act; Virginia Bruce's prettiness sacrificed to a sordid part.” Bruce would later partner with Huston’s son John in the racehorse business.

During production of Kongo, Bruce married her first husband, silent film star John Gilbert (b. 1897, d. 1936), on the MGM studio lot. The union proved to be short lived, and the couple divorced in 1934. 

In 1936, Bruce starred with Edmund Lowe in MGM’s The Garden Murder Case. The plot revolves around the death of a jockey in a race. The racing sequence was filmed at Santa Anita Park.

Three years later, Bruce married J. Walter Ruben (b. 1899, d. 1942), a screenwriter, film director, and polo enthusiast who wrote the screenplay for MGM’s Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937), a racetrack musical that was the first feature film to pair Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. One member of the Bruce-Ruben wedding party was Gene Markey, who later married Lucille Wright, the owner of horse racing’s legendary Calumet Farm, which produced two Triple Crown winners, Whirlaway and Citation. 

Ruben and Bruce purchased a home in Pacific Palisades that they called Wildtree. Ruben directed his wife in only one picture, the 1937 MGM western The Bad Man of Brimstone (aka Arizona Bill). Bruce co-starred with Wallace and Noah Beery, Dennis O’Keeffe, and Bruce Cabot. The latter was a first cousin of noted California Arabian horse breeder Frederic E. Lewis II, who established Diamond Bar Ranch.

Bruce credited the 1939 MGM film Let Freedom Ring with helping her get over her fear of horseback riding, which stemmed from a fall she’d taken many years earlier. Around this time, Bruce and Ruben purchased some racehorses for their Wildtree Stable. These included Big Ed (*Bright Knight – Codetta, by The Porter), who racked up some victories at Santa Anita as well as at Agua Caliente, and the non-winner Eternal Lady (Okapi – Rose Penn, by Upset). Bruce bred Eternal Lady to Morvich, the 1922 Kentucky Derby winner, and got Lady Morvich, who broke her maiden at Del Mar, paying $214 to win.

Bruce’s best-known racer was a half-sister to Lady Morvich. This was the bay filly Lady Bruce (*Sierra Nevada – Eternal Lady, by Okapi), a homebred she owned in partnership with director John Huston and his wife, actress Evelyn Keyes.

According to Keyes’s memoir, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister, when Lady Bruce made her racing debut, Huston, an inveterate gambler, instructed his wife to wager $1,000 on the filly, but to first ask their trainer whether to bet it all to win, or to bet across the board. The trainer indicated the latter. When Keyes told her husband that Lady Bruce had won, paying $26 to win, he was elated—until she told him how’d she placed the bet. He hung up on her and didn’t come home that night. 

Lady Bruce’s biggest claim to fame was beating the stakes winner Speculation, a well-bred son of *Mahmoud, in an allowance race at Hollywood Park. 

Bruce appeared briefly, along with fellow racehorse owner Bing Crosby, in a 1938 short film about Santa Anita.

One tantalizing bit of information in O’Brien’s biography of Bruce is that the actress collected horseshoes that had been worn by well-known racehorses. Unfortunately, O’Brien does not provide any of the horses’ names. Could she have possessed the shoes of, say, Seabiscuit, *Kayak II, Rosemont, or Stagehand? 

The year 1940 saw the release of Invisible Woman, with Bruce in the starring role. Her co-stars included John Barrymore and John Howard. The third film in the Invisible franchise, it garnered mainly favorable reviews and grossed $600,000. The film proved controversial at the time because, although Bruce’s character was invisible, she was also nude. One recent reviewer, critic Glenn Erickson, observed that Invisible Woman was “one of the few vehicles to make use of [her] talent.”

In 1946, Bruce sold her home in Pacific Palisades to actress Deanna Durbin. By this time, Bruce was taking on few acting roles and was no longer raising or racing Thoroughbreds. Her last film appearance was in the 1960 Columbia Pictures release, Strangers When We Meet. She died in 1982 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Retirement Home in Woodland Hills, California. Her obituary in the New York Times observed that she was “a popular leading lady of the 1930s and ’40s, appearing opposite such leading men as “Robert Taylor, James Stewart, Fredric March, James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, Nelson Eddy, William Powell, and Melvyn Douglas.”