Plot
In 1913 Wollaston, Massachusetts, teenage student Ruth Gordon Jones (Jean Simmons) dreams of a theatrical career after becoming mesmerized by a performance of The Pink Lady in a Boston theater. Encouraged to pursue her dream by real-life leading lady Hazel Dawn in response to a fan letter she sent her, Ruth schemes to drop out of school and move to New York City, much to the dismay of her father, Clinton Jones (Spencer Tracy), a former seaman now working at a menial factory] job, who urges her to continue her education and become a physical education instructor instead. When Ruth's audition with a leading producer proves disastrous and the girl's enthusiasm is crushed, her father offers to support her during her first few months in New York if she will at least get her high school diploma.
Read more about this topic: The Actress
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)