In the real world, Ruth married her husband, Elliot Handler, in 1938, and they started a business making home goods, often utilizing plastics. Various Barbies and Kens exist in a separate dimension where life is idyllic and the problems of the real world seldom interfere.
Handler’s creation of Barbie isn’t closely documented in the movie, which takes a more fanciful approach to the toy universe. The program was considered a success, and in 1982, the judge agreed to cut short Handler’s sentence by a year and a half. According to Gerber, after participating in scrupulously tabulated charity work that she found “humiliating,” Handler was eventually assigned the task of using her business know-how to give other convicts job training. She wanted to create a giveaway program of her Nearly Me prosthetics for underprivileged cancer patients who might otherwise be unable to afford them, but the judge rejected that proposal. Handler could have gotten 41 years in prison, but she still found her comparatively light sentence to be severe. She also used the plastics know-how she’d gathered from years in the toy business to devise prosthetic devices for other women like her and launched an entirely new business, Nearly Me, which still sells products today. That’s true Handler had breast cancer in the 1970s. Perlman’s character tells Barbie that she had a mastectomy.
The full truth of her life, in many cases, is even stranger than even the most die-hard Barbie fans may realize. But the movie does included several details that are genuine. The real Handler died in 2002 at the age of 85, so her appearance in the movie is more whimsical than realistic. Perlman, best known as the sarcastic waitress Carla from Cheers, appears in the Greta Gerwig–directed film as Ruth Handler-a real-life legend in the toy business who helped turn Mattel into a global powerhouse, in large part thanks to Barbie, introduced in 1959. It’s a moment in which the doll literally meets her maker. Handler seems to know Barbie better than she knows herself, as she should. Ruth Handler, the grandmotherly figure played by Rhea Perlman in the new Barbie movie, offers compassion and wisdom to Margot Robbie in a moment when her blissful doll-come-to-life faces an existential crisis.
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