Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her parents divorced when she was a child and she felt her father had abandoned the family, according to The New York Times. She waited tables as a teen and also worked as an artist's model to help her family out while attending school. She knew from an early age she wanted to be an actress and after some initial success on Broadway, she was ready to make the jump to Hollywood, although Hollywood, it seemed, was not ready for her.

When Davis arrived at the train station in Los Angeles, the representative from Universal failed to recognize her because he didn't think she looked like an actress, according to a 1943 New Yorker article. It only got worse for Davis. Universal didn't like her looks — her eyes were too big, her mouth too small, her neck too long, and her smile crooked, per The New Yorker. The studio put her in a few subpar roles before dropping her in the early 1930s. Just a few years later, she was on her way to becoming the biggest actress in Hollywood, winning her first Oscar for 1935's "Dangerous," per Britannica. But her tumultuous relationship with her new film studio, Warner Bros., soon came to a head.

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