Rosamond Pinchot

Rosamond Pinchot was born in New York City. Her father Amos Pinchot was a wealthy lawyer and political activist. Rosemond was educated at Miss Chaplin's school in Manhattan. Her parents divorced in 1918 and soon after her mother remarried. When she was nineteen Rosemond was discovered by theater producer Max Reinhardt.

She made her Broadway debut in the 1924 play The Miracle. Her performance got rave reviews and she was called "the loveliest woman in America". Over the next four years Rosamond starred in several more successful plays.

In 1928 she married playwright William Gaston, who had previously been married to actress Kay Francis. The couple had two sons - William and James. Rosemond stopped acting and focused on being a wife and mother.

She and William separated in 1933 but remained legally married. Rosamond rented a large fifteen room home in Old Brookeville where she lived with her children. She had many famous friends including Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1935 Rosamond played Queen Anne in the film The Three Musketeers. Unfortunately she wasn't able to get any other movie roles.

She returned to Broadway in the 1936 play St. Helene. Rosemond fell in love with theatrical director Jed Harris but she was heartbroken when he left her.

In 2001 Bibi Gaston, grand daughter of Rosamund Pinchot, received a cardboard box filled with more than 1,500 pages of her grandmother's diary. Thus began Gaston's quest to tell the story of Pinchot and the tumultuous account of her life. Not until Gaston began to read the diaries did she realize just who Rosamond Pinchot was and what she might have meant to her family had she lived. "In hundreds of images, her look was timeless," Gaston writes. "They show her in silhouette against the Manhattan skyline, under Hollywood's fabulous houses of skylights, fishing in the streams of Pennsylvania and walking her dog on the Upper East Side as though it was yesterday. Not only was she a celebrity, she was also a remarkable sportswoman and equestrian. She had dined with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis and George Gershwin. So why had no one in my family ever talked about her or shared even a single detail of her life? Rosamond seemed to have slipped off the edge of the world. There are thousands of ways of vanishing; a family's silence is one of them.".

"The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home." (2009) - a memoir written by Rosamund Pinchot's grand daughter, Bibi Gaston.