By the time Rosemary’s Baby began production in 1967, seventy-year-old Ruth Gordon was already a widely-known, four-time Oscar-nominated actress-writer of the stage and screen who had been recommended for the part by the film’s production designer, Richard Sylbert, a friend of Gordon and her husband-collaborator, Garson Kanin. On screen, few actors have ever taken more perceptible pleasure in animating a destabilizing presence as Gordon, who doesn’t grow into Minnie so much as she wears the character with flair on her patterned sleeves. Her spirited depiction of wickedness is remembered less for its dastardly actions, than for the unnerving aura...