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

1733) Gloria DeHaven

Gloria Mildred DeHaven (1925 – 2016). American actress and singer who was a contract star for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

DeHaven was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor-director Carter DeHaven and actress Flora Parker DeHaven, both former vaudeville performers. She began her career as a child actor with a bit part in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) and was then signed to a contract with MGM. 

She was also cast as a singer in many of her films including I'll Get By, So This Is Paris and The Girl Rush. In the 1950s, DeHaven often appeared at the El Rancho Vegas, the first full service hotel casino on the Las Vegas Strip. 

She also appeared in many TV shows as well.

- "Her forte was romantic musical comedy — Technicolor fare in which her golden red hair glistened for the camera..."   https://web.archive.org/web/20160802232553/https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/gloria-dehaven-actress-in-1940s-hollywood-musical-comedies-dies-at-91/2016/08/01/de86f874-57ed-11e6-9aee-8075993d73a2_story.html

1732) Phyllis Marion Gotch

Phyllis Marian Gotch (1882–1963), also known as Phyllis Maureen Gotch and in later life as Marquise de Verdières. Only child of Newlyn-based artists, Caroline Burland Yates and Thomas Cooper Gotch. She featured in several of her father's paintings, one of the most famous being The Child Enthroned. She later became a singer, a published author and campaigned for community issues in Newlyn. After the death of her first husband in 1918 she married Andre, Marquis de Verdières. Following their divorce in 1935 she married her cousin once removed, Jocelyn Bodilly, who became Chief Justice in the Western Pacific.

From her first husband, Patrick Doherty, she had her only child, Deirdre. 

In the mid 1930s Deirdre had a relationship with Major Robin Thynne who was living in the village of Paul, Cornwall not far from Newlyn. He was involved with several schemes, one of which was trying to launch the Mandrake Press. He became associated with the English occultist and novelist, Aleister Crowley, whom he hoped to publish. He introduced Deirdre Doherty to him and a friendship developed between them. Deirdre eventually had a child with Crowley named Randall Gair, who died in a car accident in 2002 at the age of 65.

My Crown and Sceptre

The Child Enthroned

The Heir to All Ages

1731) Thomas Cooper Gotch

Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854–1931). English painter and book illustrator loosely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement; he was the brother of John Alfred Gotch, the architect.

Gotch studied art in London and Antwerp before he married and studied in Paris with his wife, Caroline, a fellow artist. Returning to Britain, they settled into the Newlyn art colony in Cornwall. He first made paintings of natural, pastoral settings before immersing himself in the romantic, Pre-Raphaelite romantic style for which he is best known. His daughter was often a model for the colourful depictions of young girls.

His works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy, Royal College of Art and the Paris Salon.

Self-portrait

1730) William Peden

William "Torchy" Peden (1906 – 1980). Canadian cyclist. He was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1955 and the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 1966.

After winning five titles at the indoor Canadian championships in Montreal, he turned professional. He discovered and excelled at six-day racing. During the Great Depression, the sport was cheap for spectators and very popular. Beginning in 1929, he won 24 of 48 races over the next four years. In 1932, he set a record that still stands: 10 victories. At times, he teamed up with his younger brother Doug (the sport used two-man teams). Overall, he won 38 of 148, a record unbroken until 1965. In 1931, he set a record; riding behind a car providing a shield against the wind, he achieved a speed of 73.5 miles per hour (118.3 km/h). He also coached the 1932 national cycling team and the 1936 track team.

During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He participated in his last six-day race in 1942 and his last professional cycling race in 1948.

He moved to the United States in the 1950s and opened a sporting goods store.

- "The redhead acquired the nickname "Torchy" when a journalist described him as a "flame-haired youth leading the pack like a torch"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Peden

1729) Charles Cottet

Charles Cottet (1863 – 1925). French painter. A famed Post-Impressionist, Cottet is known for his dark, evocative painting of rural Brittany and seascapes. He led a school of painters known as the Bande noire or "Nubians" group (for the sombre palette they used, in contrast to the brighter Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings), and was friends with such artists as Auguste Rodin.

Self-portrait

Self-portrait

Portrait by Émile-René Ménard 

1728) Margaret Looney

Margaret Ethel Looney (1904 - 1929). Radium dial painter, one of the first victims of radiation poisoning from working at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois. She began dial-painting aged 17, in part to help earn money for her family. She never left Radium Dial but worked there until just a week before her death, which came on 14 August 1929.

The so-called Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials – watch dials and hands with self-luminous paint. The incidents occurred at three factories in the United States: one in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s; and one in Waterbury, Connecticut, also in the 1920s.

After being told that the paint was harmless, the women in each facility ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to "point" their brushes on their lips in order to give them a fine tip. The women were instructed to point their brushes in this way because using rags or a water rinse caused them to use more time and material, as the paint was made from powdered radium, zinc sulfide (a phosphor), gum arabic, and water.

The Radium Girls had lasting effects on the labor laws in the United States and Europe following numerous lawsuits following deaths and illness from ingestion of radium.

- "She had red hair, was slender, had a voice ever soft, gentle and low, and was prone to giggling fits."   https://www.theradiumgirls.com/the-girls

1727) Arabella Huntington

Arabella Duval Huntington (née Yarrington; c. 1850/1851 – 1924). American philanthropist and once known as the richest woman in the country, as a result of inheritances she received upon the deaths of her husbands. She was the force behind the art collection that is housed at the Huntington Library in California.

She was the second wife of Collis P. Huntington, an American railway tycoon and industrialist. After his death, she married his nephew, Henry E. Huntington, also a railway magnate, and founder of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, California.

- "Her thick, wavy auburn hair cascaded down her back when it wasn’t pinned up."   https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a61730267/alva-vanderbilt-arabella-huntington-gilded-age-feud/

- "Arabella had red hair." https://insidethehuntingtonsstory.com/2021/08/31/arabella-huntingtons-portraits-tiaras-and-jewels/

Portrait by Giovanni Boldini

1726) Alva Belmont

Alva Erskine Belmont (née Smith; 1853 – 1933), known as Alva Vanderbilt from 1875 to 1896. American multi-millionaire socialite and women's suffrage activist. 

She was married twice, to socially prominent New York City millionaires William Kissam Vanderbilt, with whom she had three children, and Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont. Alva was known for her many building projects, including the Petit Chateau in New York; the Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island; the Belmont House in New York; Brookholt in Long Island; and Beacon Towers in Sands Point, New York.

- "By the 1870s, Alva was a vivacious young woman educated in Paris, fluent in French culture and admired for her dark red hair and poise." https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/gilded-age-new-york-alva-vanderbilt-secrets-to-success/

- "Her vibrant red hair is crowned with a tiara and she wears a thick rope of pearls rumored to have once belonged to Catherine the Great."  https://www.bookmovement.com/bookDetailView/73906/The-Social-Graces-Ren%C3%A9e-Rosen/1

 

1725) John Humphrey Noyes

John Humphrey Noyes (1811 – 1886). American preacher, radical religious philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded utopian communities at Putney, Vermont, Oneida, New York, and Wallingford, Connecticut, and is credited with coining the term "complex marriage".

- "Endowed with a ruddy, freckled complexion and a bright red shock of hair, John Humphrey Noyes early gave signs of a passionate nature to match... He was further hampered by the conviction that his red hair and freckles rendered him physically repulsive." https://www.thehistoryreader.com/historical-figures/polly-hayes-noyes/ 

- "Born September 3, 1811, in Brattleboro, Vermont, Noyes was the fourth of nine children, a boy with bright red hair and freckles." https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/charles-guiteau-oneida-community

1724) Ann Gotlib

Ann Gotlib (1971 – disappeared in 1983). Soviet Jewish immigrant to the United States who disappeared at the age of 12 from the premises of a Louisville, Kentucky mall. The case to find her abductor was covered heavily by the Louisville news media and stretched for the next twenty-five years until a person of interest was eventually identified.

Ann was last seen on June 1, 1983, between 5:30 and 6:00 PM. She was visiting Bashford Manor Mall, across the street from the apartment complex where she lived with her family. Her bike was later found outside the Bacon's Department Store at the mall.

Due to the startling way in which Gotlib had vanished in broad daylight without any trace, it was a key case that led the United States Congress to create the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984 to coordinate departments involved in missing-persons cases. The center credits the Gotlib case with increasing national awareness of missing and abducted children and revolutionizing how missing-child cases are handled. One new technique that came out of the investigation was the use of billboards and other tactics to generate widespread awareness of a missing person, which was considered futile according to conventional wisdom at the time.

- "At the time that Ann disappeared, she was 12 years old and was described as having red hair and gray eyes." https://www.lmpd.gov/305/Ann-Gotlib

1723) Austin "Red" Robbins

Austin "Red" Robbins (1944 –  2009). American basketball player.

Robbins, a 6'8" power forward/center from Leesburg, Florida, starred at the University of Tennessee in the 1960s and then played professionally for the American Basketball Association's New Orleans Buccaneers (1967–1970), Utah Stars (1970–1972), San Diego Conquistadors (1972–1973; 1973–1974), Kentucky Colonels (1973; 1974–1975), and Virginia Squires (1975–1976).

- "Robbins was nicknamed for his red hair and perceived fiery personality, and grabbed over 6,000 rebounds in his career." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Robbins

1722) Helen Brach

Helen Marie Brach (née Voorhees; 1911 – disappeared 1977). American multimillionaire widow whose wealth had come from marrying into the E. J. Brach & Sons Candy Company fortune; she endowed the Helen V. Brach Foundation to promote animal welfare in 1974. Brach disappeared on February 17, 1977, and in May 1984 she was declared legally dead, as of the date of her disappearance. An investigation into the case uncovered serious criminal activity associated with Chicago horse stable owners, including Silas Jayne and Richard Bailey. More than a decade later Bailey was charged with, but not convicted of, conspiring to murder Brach; he eventually received a sentence of 30 years after being convicted of defrauding her.

- "Frank took his fortune and retired with his third wife, Helen Brach, a red-haired Appalachian hat-check girl he'd met at a Miami Beach country club." https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2022/11/disappearance-of-candy-lady-helen-brach-unwrapped.html

- "The red-haired beauty was already divorced by age twenty-one, blaming herself for the failure of her marriage to a philandering playboy." https://troytaylorbooks.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-disappearance-of-helen-brach.html

1721) Salvatore "Silvio" Laboroi

 Salvatore "Silvio" Laboroi (1930 - 1945). Italian volunteer in the Xª Flottiglia MAS.

He was born in Aosta Valley. In 1944, he run away from home to join the Xª Flottiglia MAS of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, but because of his young age he was not enlisted. In December 1944, near the city of Trnovo (today in Slovenia), the Xª Flottiglia MAS fought against the Yugoslavian troops led by Josip Broz Tito, which wanted to take Gorizia away from Italy. 

With the help of a steward, Silvio hid among the crates of biscuits in a supply convoy, thus also reaching Trnovo. Once discovered, the commander decided to let him stay, but he was kept away from the line of fire and assigned to the battalion kitchen. He, however, decided to return to the line of fire. When the commander was wounded, Silvio defended him and was wounded himself. He died three months later.

- "Capelli rossi, come la passione della Patria che lo animò e lo sostenne, occhi intelligenti, intensi e candidi come la sua anima d’adolescente, il suo viso era pieno di lentiggini e quelle erano le uniche macchie che aveva. [Red hair, like the passion for his country that inspired and sustained him, intelligent eyes, intense and candid like his adolescent soul, his face was full of freckles and those were the only blemishes he had.]" https://sullebarricate.wordpress.com/2025/12/23/laboroi-silvio-a-quattordici-anni-caduto-per-lonore-ditalia/

- "Capelli rossicci, viso di lentiggini, occhi intelligenti e intensi. [Reddish hair, freckled face, intelligent and intense eyes]." https://www.italia-rsi.it/cadutiperlarsi/cadutiperlarsi.htm