Ruth Fisher

Ruth Fisher is the mother at the center of the Fisher family, a woman who has spent decades keeping house, tending secrets, and holding her feelings at arm's length. When her husband dies suddenly, she's left running the family funeral home and facing, for the first time in years, the question of who she actually is.

Frances Conroy plays repression as a physical language — the clipped voice, the darting eyes, the sudden odd bursts of honesty that embarrass everyone including Ruth herself. The show lets her be maddening and sympathetic in the same scene, a woman waking up late to her own life, and Conroy never softens the awkwardness of that waking.