Lucille Carroll

Garnett Lucille Ryman Carroll, stage name Jane Starr (June 10, 1906 - October 23, 2002) was an American Broadway actress and the first female studio executive in Hollywood.

Carroll was born to Dr. Herbert D. Ryman and Cora Belle (Norris) Ryman while her father was a medical student at Kansas State Medical College. Dr. Ryman died in France while a field surgeon during World War I when she was about twelve, and her mother Cora Belle, a schoolteacher, raised the children.

Lucille, as she was known, graduated from Decatur High School in Decatur, Illinois and went on to Millikin University, where she was a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority and acted in plays. During the following five years, she taught at Assumption High School and Roosevelt Junior High, acting in plays staged by Decatur's Town and Gown Players, a community theater company. Moving to California to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1931, she won a $1,000 scholarship. She quit her teaching job in Decatur to act in and direct plays at the playhouse, where movie actors graced the stage and directors sought new talent.

Lucille's brother, Herbert Ryman (1910-1989) was a prominent Disney imagineer.

Using the stage name Jane Starr, she worked with movie producer Louis O. Macloon at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, demonstrating how motion pictures were made. Macloon, who had recently given an actor named Clark Gable some of his first parts, chose her to star in the Broadway play It Pays to Sin. When the play received scathing reviews and closed, Carroll sought consolation by visiting backstage with Katharine Hepburn, then 26, who had also received terrible reviews while acting in a nearby theater. Instead Hepburn was characteristically blunt. "Then you're not an actress," Hepburn told Carroll. "I don't care what the critics say about me. I know what I am."

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