Who created the Barbie doll? The dramatic rise and fall of Ruth Handler, the woman who co

In the endless stream of buzz that has taken over the internet since Barbie's cinematic release, one meme about the real people who inspired the story stood out.

"That scene in the barbie movie where barbie tells that old woman that she's so beautiful … that's THE barbara handler aka the daughter of the inspiration of barbie," one keen fan observed.

The tweet was shared thousands of times, and set to Billie Eilish's Barbie track, What Was I Made For, in countless TikToks celebrating one of the film's most pure, emotional highlights.

Of course, this adorable Easter egg turned out to be not quite true.

The woman on the bench is actually played by Oscar-nominated costume designer Ann Roth, a close friend of director Greta Gerwig.

But the virality of this would-be cameo demonstrates just how obsessed modern audiences have become with the peek behind the curtain.

And the true story of another character with seven minutes of screen time has a real life backstory worthy of its very own box office smash.

In glimpses over a few short scenes, the audience learns little snippets of the mysterious mentor-like figure played by Rhea Perlman, before she finally spells it out in full for Margot Robbie's Barbie.

"I am Mattel. At least, until the IRS got to me."

Ruth Moskowicz was born to immigrant parents in 1916 in the city of Denver, Colorado and was the youngest of 10 children.

The woman who would one day create a best-selling fashion doll grew up in the shadow of war and a global economic crisis.

But a short holiday to Los Angeles opened 19-year-old Ruth's eyes to the possibilities of a life outside her small city.

On a whim, she took a job at Paramount Studios and moved to the big metropolis with her high school sweetheart, Elliot Handler, in 1938.

Their first business venture started out as a hobby. When the artistically inclined Elliot started making furniture out of a new plastic, Lucite, in his garage, Ruth saw an opportunity to turn it into a lucrative business.

Together they formed Elliot Handler Plastics, designing and manufacturing novelty goods for children from 1939 to 1942.

Elliot oversaw product creation, while Ruth handled the sales and business, marking the beginning of a successful partnership that eventually earned them a moniker as "the whiz kids of the toy industry".

Within three years, the young couple — along with their friend Harold Matson (the Matt of Mattel) — would form one of the biggest toy brands in the world.

Mattel manufactured doll furniture before branching out into musical toys, finding success with a child-sized toy ukulele dubbed the Uke-A-Doodle and the fortune-telling Magic-8 ball.

But it was Ruth who transformed the company into a distinctive brand with a high-stakes gamble in 1955.

Television had become a driving force of advertising and Handler, who was the company's vice president in charge of sales and marketing, made a risky decision to invest $US500,000 on commercials.

The entire net worth of Mattel was spent on three ads for its most popular products, which would feature during Disney's television show, The Mickey Mouse Club.

The marketing campaign paid off. Within three years, Mattel's sales went from $US3 million to $US14 million and the company's slogan "If it's Mattel, it's Swell" was everywhere.

Mattel had begun to edge out its biggest rivals, Louis Marx and Company and Kenner Products, in the toy sector. By the end of the decade, its revenues would exceed them.

Meanwhile, Ruth Handler was onto her next big idea.

It would turn Mattel into an international juggernaut and revolutionise America's toy industry.

She just had one problem: the men around her weren't on board.

A family vacation to Europe in the summer of 1956 changed the course of Ruth's life.

For some years she had been mulling over the idea of an adult-looking fashion doll after watching her daughter play with paper dolls.

She was fascinated by the way Barbara and her friends interacted with the toys and projected themselves onto them, but when she took the idea to Mattel's executives, they scoffed.

"Our guys all said, 'Naw, no good'," she recalled in an interview with the LA Times.

"I tried more than once and nobody was interested, and I gave up."

While out walking with her daughter on the cobbled streets of Lucerne, Ruth was drawn to a toy-shop window selling plastic dolls.

"The dolls looked elongated and cartoonish and were dressed in gorgeous costumes. One was in a ski outfit; another had a distinctly European costume," Robin Gerber wrote of the fateful encounter in her 2009 book, Barbie and Ruth.

"Ruth and Barbara had never seen dolls like these before."

The German doll was called Bild Lilli, based on a cartoon character featured in gossip newspaper Bild-Zeitung, who was known for seducing rich men.

The toys were originally marketed as gag gifts for adults and sold in tobacco shops, bars and adult-themed toy stores before they became popular with kids.

For Ruth, it was proof her idea could work.

"Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future," Handler told the New York Times in 1977.

"If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful breasts."

Ruth took the Bild Lilli dolls back to America, but finding a supplier who could make the product to her specifications was difficult.

Japanese manufacturers reacted with distaste at the designs, and struggled to find a suitable plastic, according to Gerber.

A desperate search for a more malleable material uncovered a new type of plastic, PVC, which was used to make the first moulds.

Ruth Handler christened the doll Barbie, after her daughter Barbara, and unveiled Mattel's new product at a Toy Fair in 1959, where it failed to attract a buyer.

A detailed marketing plan revealed why Barbie was struggling to cut through and when the produce was unveiled on television months later, she was marketed not as a doll but as a model for young girls.

The orders rolled in. After years spent railing against the baby dolls that saturated the market, Ruth had introduced a woman seemingly made in her own image.

"Ruth works a full day, driving away in a pink Thunderbird at 8:15am every day with her husband, leaving a gorgeous $75,000 home in Beverly Wood," the LA Times wrote in 1959.

Two decades after the toy venture began, Mattel had grown into a thriving multi-million-dollar corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with Ruth Handler as president.

Barbie's rapid expansion boosted sales to more than $US100 million in 1965, and by the end of the decade, Hot Wheels accelerated the brand to become the number one toy maker in the world.

The company was pumping out new products at pace and diversifying acquisitions to everything from playground equipment to pet supplies.

But the dream soon began to unravel.

The first signs of financial trouble emerged at Mattel just as the Handlers were dealing with a crisis on the home front.

After years of doctors slicing out benign lumps in both of her breasts, Ruth discovered a cancerous tumour.

In a modified mastectomy, her entire left breast was removed along with parts of her chest muscles and lymph nodes, leaving Ruth with permanent nerve damage and lifelong pain.

She took just a few weeks off work to recover before returning to the office.

While Elliott focused on the creative side of the business, Ruth began to feel she was losing control of financial decisions.

She clashed with other top executives over the direction of the company and several investments that went south.

The co-founder herself later admitted: "In fact, most of our acquisitions proved to be mistakes."

In the same year, a fire broke out at one of Mattel's biggest factories, destroying millions of dollars' worth of Christmas orders, and a Hot Wheels spin-off failed to take off.

Under significant pressure to right the ship, Mattel adopted creative accounting techniques to stay afloat and keep the stock price humming along.

Annualised accounting allowed the company to defer expenses until the typically busy Christmas period.

Using a practice known as "bill and hold" to invoice their clients before orders had been shipped, they were able to report massively inflated earnings.

Fake invoices were drawn up, customers' signatures were forged, and hypothetical future sales were recorded in a second set of books.

Executives were betting that the company would somehow make up the shortfall in revenue before anyone came looking for the real numbers.

But the facade wouldn't last. In March 1972, Mattel announced a loss of $US29 million in the previous financial year — a first in the company's almost three-decade history.

As the company's position worsened, the stock price plummeted, raising red flags with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).

Mattel had become a laughing stock, and was soon drowning in lawsuits brought by disgruntled shareholders.

As part of an out-of-court settlement deal, the Handlers resigned from the board, walking away from the company they had built together along with 2.5 million shares.

And after months of investigations, the SEC determined Mattel had cooked the books.

Less than a year after being ousted from the company she founded, and with federal agents circling, Ruth Handler was searching for a new venture.

"I went into retirement in 1975 and I hated it. I was as low as a person could get emotionally, psychologically," Handler told columnist MG Lord for her 1994 book, Forever Barbie.

"And I was having trouble finding a breast prosthesis. So I got into the business."

Inspired by her own struggles coming to terms with her post-mastectomy body, Handler started a line of prosthetic inserts under a new company, this time bearing her name: Ruthton.

She was just as specific about getting the design right for Nearly Me prosthetics as she had been about finding the right plastic for Barbie.

"Until now, every breast that was sold was used interchangeably for the right or left side. There has never been a shoemaker who made one shoe and forced you to put both your right and your left foot in it," Handler told the New York Times in 1977.

The unique design, combining soft silicone and foam padding, was seen as a significant step forward in prostheses technology.

With a team of middle-aged women, many of whom had also lost their breasts to cancer, Ruth took her new invention on tour, offering free fittings in doctor's offices and department stores.

Before long Ruth was back in business. But the threat of federal charges was still looming.

In February 1978, Ruth Handler was indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy, mail fraud and making false statements to the SEC.

The indictment charged Ruth and Mattel's former vice president Seymour Rosenberg with falsifying records to inflate the company's value on the stock market, allowing them to borrow from the Bank of America and sell off Mattel stock for their own personal gain.

According to Gerber's book, the indictment alleged she had made $US383,000 from selling off shares as her children's trustee. Rosenberg made $US1.9 million.

Ruth vowed to fight the charges, but eventually pleaded no contest.

In sentencing, the judge reportedly described the Mattel executives' crimes as "explosive, parasitic and disgraceful", and ordered Handler to pay $US57,000 in reparations and serve 2,500 hours of community service.

Many saw it as a fitting punishment for a rich and powerful woman who was either complicit or wilfully ignorant of her company's corporate crimes.

For her part, Ruth maintained she knew about the bill and hold scheme but not the extent of its deception.

"She was president of Mattel … but she stops short of admitting any knowledge of the fraudulent number crunching happening all around her," Gerber wrote in Barbie and Ruth.

"She still received weekly, sometimes daily reports … that would have shown that, for example, 100,000 units of a toy were sold, but only a dozen were in inventory ready to ship.

"It is unlikely that the woman who had caught the tiniest error in the past would miss the gross overstatements that bill and hold created."

But Ruth, and people close to her, always maintained that sexism was at the heart of her troubles in the board room and the courtroom.

"[My mother] was hated because she was a strong, powerful woman," her son, Ken, told MG Lord for her book Forever Barbie.

"These men were not able to sit back and take that much strength from a woman. And my mother wasn't very diplomatic always; she could be very tough.

"So they resented her deeply, and they conspired against her in her absence."

As part of her mandated community service, Ruth started a foundation to help white collar criminals and disadvantaged young men access job training, while juggling her expanding prosthetics empire.

By the time she sold the business to Kimberly-Clark in 1991, it was worth much more to her than money.

"It sure rebuilt my self-esteem, and I think I rebuilt the self-esteem of others," Ruth said of Nearly Me.

After years in exile, she was welcomed back into the fold at Mattel in the 1990s as the ultimate brand rep: Barbie's creator was front and centre again, holding up her doll as a role model for young girls.

The movie version of Ruth Handler lives on as a ghostly God-like figure on the 17th floor the Mattel offices of the "real world".

And while the real Ruth died more than 20 years ago, her story is intrinsically linked to the doll she fought tooth and nail to bring to life.

As Gerber concluded in Barbie and Ruth:

"Ruth personified her own ideal for Barbie, a woman who defied convention and culture to realise her dreams."