Quick Facts
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Ethel Borden Harriman (December 11, 1897 –July 4, 1953), later known as Ethel Russell and Ethel B. Borden, was an American heiress, actress, and author who worked as a screenwriter at MGM and RKO during the 1930s.
Biography
Ethel Harriman was born into a wealthy New York family in 1897. Her father, J. Borden Harriman, was a banker, and her mother, Florence "Daisy" Hurst, was a suffragette and diplomat. Ethel served with the Women's Ambulance Service in France during World War I, and afterward spent two years as an actress in a theatrical stock company.
Ethel married stockbroker Henry Potter Russell; the pair divorced in 1925. She began writing screenplays after being encouraged to do so by playwright Noël Coward. She published a comedic book, Romantic, I Call It, in 1926, and took on writing assignments in Hollywood at MGM, penning films like They Wanted to Marry and I Live My Life under the name Ethel Borden. She continued to act in the 1930s, appearing in productions such as the Ziegfeld Follies.
Later in her life, Borden was in a long-term relationship with the British novelist Pamela Frankau. She died of leukemia on July 4, 1953, in New York City, and was survived by her daughter, Phyllis Russell, and her son, Charles Howland Russell.
Selected filmography
- After Office Hours (1935)
- I Live My Life (1935)
- They Wanted to Marry (1937)
