He was born in Los Angeles on June 11, 1889. (His brother was actorCharles Ruggles). He began his career in 1915 as an actor, appearing in a dozen or so films, on occasion with Charles Chaplin. In 1917, he turned his attention to directing, making more than fifty mostly forgettable films before he won acclaim with Cimarron in 1931. The adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel about homesteaders settling in the prairies of Oklahoma was the first Western to win an Academy Award as Best Picture.
Although Ruggles followed this success with the drama No Man of Her Own with Barbara Stanwyck (1932) and the Mae West comedy I'm No Angel (1933), few of his later films were in any way memorable, and his career was on the downslide when he teamed with the Rank Organisation in 1946 to produce and direct London Town with Sid Field and Petula Clark, based on a story he wrote. The film - British cinema's first attempt at a technicolor musical extravaganza - is notable as being one of the biggest critical and commercial failures in that country's film history. Ironically, Ruggles had been hired to helm it because as an American, it was thought, he was better equipped to handle a musical - despite the fact that nothing in his past had prepared him to work in the genre. It proved to be his last film. (A truncated version was released in the States under the title My Heart Goes Crazy by United Artists in 1953.)
WesleyRuggles (June 11, 1889 - January 8, 1972) was an American film director.
Ironically, Ruggles had been hired to helm it because as an American, it was thought, he was better equipped to handle a musical - despite the fact that nothing in his past had prepared him to work in the genre.
Ruggles died in 1972 in Santa Monica and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Ruggles thought that the notion of bringing two of England's most popular stage comedians together with America's cinematic equivalent was paving the box office with gold, but the actual storyline left a lot to be desired.
WesleyRuggles, who from those who remember him, seems to have been a rather loud, aggressive American film maker with a winning smile and a quick tongue, which would make his obviously disastrous ideas pave their streets in gold, was coordinating the whole project.
Ruggles would have had to act as a human dynamo to complete such a schedule, and by all accounts he seemed capable of doing this, with the imperative being that he had to have the whole thing ready for release before the Boys left for home in America toward the end of Autumn that year.
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