1740) Hilda Petrie

Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie (née Urlin; 1871–1957). Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Having studied geology, she was hired by Flinders Petrie at age 25 as an artist, which led to their marriage and a working partnership that endured for their lifetimes.

In her teens, she sat for the painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Holiday (1839 - 1927) Aspasia on the Pnyx, and he was the one who would later introduce Hilda to Flinders Petrie, who needed someone to make drawings for a book he was planning to write about the history of costume.

 

- "Hilda was described as an attractive redhead...”  https://storiesfromthemuseumfloor.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/hilda-and-flinders-a-reluctant-romance/

 

- " Attractive, with modish red hair, Hilda sat for the Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Holiday..." https://the-past.com/comment/hilda-petrie-1871-1956/ 

Aspasia on the Pnyx. Hilda Petrie is the woman on the right

Hilda and Flinders Petrie

 

1739) Ruth Marie Terry

Ruth Marie Terry (1936 – 1974, also known as Lady of the Dunes). American formerly unidentified murder victim, the oldest case of unidentified murder victim of Massachusetts.

She was found on July 26, 1974, in the Race Point Dunes near to Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States. Her body was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013 in efforts to identify her. In 2022, the FBI field office in Boston announced that Terry had been officially identified and her husband Guy Muldavin, who died in 2002, was officially named as her killer in 2023.

 

- "She had long auburn or red hair pulled back into a ponytail by a gold-flecked elastic band." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ruth_Marie_Terry 

 

- " Now the auburn-haired woman whose story has been a mystery for so long has a name: Ruth Marie Terry." https://provincetownindependent.org/tag/lady-in-the-dunes/

 

  

1738) Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (born Margaret Macdonald, 1864 – 1933). British artist who worked in Scotland, and whose design work became one of the defining features of the Glasgow Style during the 1890s to 1900s.

In 1890, along with her sister Frances, she enrolled as day students at the Glasgow School of Art studying courses in design. There, she worked with a variety of media, including metalwork, embroidery, and textiles. 

Margaret began collaborating with her sister and in 1896 the pair worked from their studio in Glasgow, where they produced book illustrations, embroidery, gesso panels, leaded glass and repoussé metalwork. Their innovative work was inspired by Celtic imagery, literature, symbolism, and folklore. Margaret later collaborated with her husband, the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom she married on 22 August 1900. Her most well-known works are the gesso panels made for interiors designed with Charles, such as tearooms and private residences.

 

- "The artist Margaret Macdonald, the architect’s wife, is in the drawing room, putting the finishing touches to the gesso panel above the fireplace; her red hair is pinned up beneath a hat..." https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/we-must-save-this-house

 

- "Margaret Macdonald, tall and freckled, with copper red hair, would have an enormous influence on Mackintosh's work." https://www.stanleymeisler.com/article/ahead-of-the-curve-the-art-of-charles-rennie-mackintosh 

 

1737) Ruth Judd

Ruth Judd (1905 – 1998, born Winifred Ruth McKinnell).  American medical secretary in Phoenix, Arizona, who was accused of murdering her friends, Anne LeRoi and Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson, in October 1931. The murders were discovered when Judd transported the victims' bodies, one of which had been dismembered, from Phoenix to Los Angeles, California, by train in trunks and other luggage, causing the press to name the case the "Trunk Murders". Judd allegedly committed the murders after a jealousy-based argument about Jack Halloran, a prominent Phoenix businessman.

Judd was tried for LeRoi's murder, found guilty, and sentenced to death. However, the sentence was later repealed after she was found mentally incompetent, and she was committed to the Arizona State Asylum for the Insane. Over the next three decades, Judd escaped from the asylum six times; after her final escape during the 1960s, she remained at large for over six years and worked under an assumed name for a wealthy family. She was ultimately paroled in 1971 and discharged from parole in 1983.

Judd's murder investigation and trial were marked by sensationalized newspaper coverage and suspicious circumstances suggesting that at least one other person might have been involved in the crimes. 

- "Even among the scandalous crimes of 1930s Los Angeles, the saga of Judd--a tiny, sweet-faced young woman with red hair and enigmatic blue eyes..."   https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-jul-13-me-12329-story.html 

- "She had copper-colored hair and large, curiously pale blue eyes.” https://www.major-smolinski.com/ONEKIND/RUTHJUDDX.html

1736) Michael Medwin

 Michael Hugh Medwin (1923 – 2020). English stage and film actor and film producer.

Medwin's West End theatre credits include Man and Superman, The Rivals, Love for Love, Duckers and Lovers, Alfie, St Joan of the Stockyards, and What the Butler Saw. At the National Theatre he played a season which included Weapons of Happiness, Volpone and The Madras House. He also played Lloyd Dallas in one of the casts of the long-running production of Noises Off in the early 1980s.

He is probably best known for his role as radio boss Don Satchley in the BBC television detective series Shoestring, as well as for playing Scrooge's nephew Harry in the film version of Scrooge, a musical based on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

He made many film appearances, taking a leading role as Ginger Edwards in the 1953 Guy Hamilton film The Intruder. Others included Carry On Nurse (1959) and The Longest Day (1962), before turning to producing films.

Among the films he produced for Memorial Enterprises, a company he established with actor Albert Finney, are Charlie Bubbles (1967), directed by Finney, and Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

- "As a young actor, with red hair and wide grin, he ranged effortlessly from war drama to light comedy..." https://web.archive.org/web/20200307234906/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/02/27/michael-medwin-actor-familiar-face-1950s-tv-cinema-later-television/

1735) Janis Paige

Janis Paige (born Donna Mae Tjaden; 1922 –  2024). American actress and singer. With a career spanning nearly 60 years, she was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

After high school, she moved to Los Angeles, where she became a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II, as well as posing as a pin-up model.

This led to a film contract with Warner Bros., although she later left the studio to pursue live theatre work, appearing in a number of Broadway shows. She continued to alternate between film and theatre work for much of her career. Beginning in the mid-1950s, she also made numerous television appearances, as well as starring in her own sitcom It's Always Jan.

- "Janis Paige, the ebullient redhead who starred in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game..." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/janis-paige-dead-silk-stockings-pajama-game-1235914085/

1734) Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835 – 1915). English popular novelist of the Victorian era. She is best known for her 1862 novel Lady Audley's Secret, which is considered one of the foundational examples of sensation fiction. She is known for her focus on bigamous relationships in her novels, as well as her illegitimate marriage to John Maxwell (1824–1895), a publisher of periodicals

Aside from writing, Braddon worked as an actress for eight years as a way to support herself and her mother. After establishing herself as a successful writer, she worked as a magazine editor and publisher. Braddon founded the magazine Belgravia in 1866.

- "Tall with curly auburn hair, and later described as having a very fine speaking voice, she decided upon the then shocking career of actress."  https://www.sensationpress.com/literarylives.htm 

Portrait of Mary Elizabeth Braddon by William Powell Frith, 1865