Howard Ruby, the founding father of Oakwood Worldwide, the corporate that gives furnished, prolonged keep housing, and the husband of late actress Yvette Mimieux, died Monday of pure causes in Los Angeles, a publicist introduced. He was 90.
Ruby and Mimieux, identified for her turns in such movies as The place the Boys Are, Mild within the Piazza, Jackson County Jail and Toys within the Attic, had been married from December 1986 till her loss of life in January 2022 at age 80.
Mimieux had been married to Singin’ within the Rain director Stanley Donen from 1972 till their 1985 divorce.
Born in Cleveland on March 28, 1935, Ruby graduated from the Wharton Faculty of Enterprise, then joined the U.S. Navy, the place he was a provide officer. After the service, he began an actual property partnership in California that led to the formation of R&B Realty Group in 1960.
In 1965, R&B opened the South Bay Membership, the primary furnished residences for singles, in Marina del Rey. The idea advanced into totally furnished residences with home items and housekeeping within the Nineteen Seventies, and the agency, with places in 50 states and 86 international locations, would go on to change into the world’s largest supplier of furnished residences.
In 2014, Fortune journal dubbed him the “Father of Company Housing.” (Oakwood was bought to Singapore-based The Ascott Restricted in 2022).
Regardless of being recognized with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited, degenerative eye illness that causes extreme imaginative and prescient impairment, Ruby was an avid photographer who took quite a few journeys to the Arctic to {photograph} polar bears and cubs.
He was moved to create the Local weather Classroom Youngsters Web site and finally partnered with the Nationwide Wildlife Federation to develop an academic outreach program that used his images of melting ice and threatened animals to level out the specter of world warming.
Ruby, who additionally donated photographs to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Heart and to the College of California Santa Barbara Faculty of Environmental Sciences, was named the 2007 Conservation Photographer of the Yr by the NWF.
His philanthropic efforts additionally included a present to the College of Iowa Institute for Imaginative and prescient Analysis to speed up its efforts to create dwelling retinal grafts from patient-derived stem cells.
As his retinitis pigmentosa progressed, Ruby started rowing and competed in competitions till he was in his late 80s.
Survivors embody his kids, Steven, Michael and Donna, 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.