Ruby Litchfield

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Dame Ruby Beatrice Litchfield (born Ruby Skinner; 5 September 1912 – 14 August 2001) was an Australian theatre director, board member and community worker. She was born in Subiaco, Western Australia, and moved to Adelaide with her family, where she attended North Adelaide Primary School and Seymour College. In the 1920s she excelled in dancing and studied elocution with Thelma Baulderstone. She was also a successful tennis player, winning several South Australian hard-court championships between 1932 and 1935, and was named Miss Centenary in 1936.

While teaching elocution, she began performing with the Adelaide Repertory Theatre in 1930 and became a board member there in the 1940s. In the 1940s and 1950s she helped raise funds for the Red Cross by organising tennis tournaments and staging concerts and plays. She married Kenneth Litchfield on 27 August 1940 and continued to play tennis and act in amateur drama.

In 1967 she became a life member of the Adelaide Repertory Theatre. She broke new ground as the first woman on the boards of the South Australia Housing Trust and, in 1971, the Adelaide Festival and Centre Trust. She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1959 for social welfare, and in 1981 she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her service to the performing arts and the community.

A plaque in her honor was placed in Adelaide’s Jubilee 150 Walkway in 1986. She passed away in Adelaide in 2001. The Dame Ruby Litchfield Scholarship for Performing Arts was created in 1993 (administered by Carclew and ended in 2016). Since 2006, the Ruby Awards have recognized achievements in arts and culture in South Australia. In 2019 she was added to the Suffrage 125 City of Adelaide Honour Roll for her lifelong work.