Eleanor Keaton

Eleanor Ruth Keaton (née Norris; July 29, 1918 – October 19, 1998) was an American dancer and variety show performer. She was an MGM contract dancer in her teens and became the third wife of silent-film comedian Buster Keaton at the age of 21. She is credited with rehabilitating her husband's life and career. The two performed at the Cirque Medrano in Paris and on European tours in the 1950s; she also performed with him on The Buster Keaton Show in the early 1950s. After his death in 1966, she helped ensure Keaton's legacy by giving many interviews to biographers, film historians, and journalists, sharing details from his personal life and career, and also attended film festivals and celebrations honoring Keaton. In her later years, she bred champion St. Bernard dogs, was a gag consultant for Hollywood filmmakers, and was an invited speaker at silent-film screenings.

Early life and career Eleanor Ruth Norris was born in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1918. Her father, a studio electrician for Warner Brothers, died in a fall from a scaffold in January 1929, aged 37. Her mother raised her and her sister on a small pension from the studio. Norris later said that she matured quickly after her father's death and became "a pretty direct and straightforward young lady".

Eleanor accompanied Buster to all of his engagements and location shooting for his films. He performed in state fairs in Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Tennessee, and Alabama; in fact, it was on a return trip from the Kansas State Fair that Eleanor, driving while Buster dozed, stopped the car when she realized they were in Piqua and introduced him to the place he had been born while his parents were touring in a medicine show. The couple also traveled nearly across Canada for the filming of The Railrodder and the accompanying documentary Buster Keaton Rides Again.

Eleanor was widely credited with rehabilitating Buster's life and career.

Buster Keaton died on February 1, 1966. After his death, Eleanor worked to ensure his legacy. She attended film festivals and film screenings celebrating his work around the world. Her presence at the second and third annual Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola, Kansas, in 1994 and 1995 helped legitimize the event. She was later honored as a recipient of The Buster, an award given by the International Buster Keaton Society.

In 1995, the centenary of Buster's birth, film retrospectives and conferences were held in the U.S. and Canada. Eleanor attended events in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Los Angeles, Muskegon, Michigan, and Piqua, Kansas.

In June 1998, Keaton donated more than 900 items of her husband's personal memorabilia from 1938 to 1966 to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the urging of biographer Jeffrey Vance, who argued that these materials should be preserved in an archive rather than in the hands of private collectors or sold at auction. This memorabilia included "very early original vintage photographs from Keaton's infancy, childhood, and vaudeville days, as well as a Keaton family photo album of snapshots dating from 1909 to 1917". Keaton also gifted film stills and other memorabilia to the Buster Keaton Memorial Museum in Piqua. She contributed many stories and personal photographs to Vance for his 2001 coffee-table book Buster Keaton Remembered.

Keaton also owned a pet shop and bred St. Bernard dogs descended from one of Buster's pets. Some of these dogs appeared in the Beethoven film series.

Death In October 1998, Keaton was hospitalized at the Motion Picture Relief Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills suffering from emphysema and lung cancer.