She doesn't do the nostalgia circuit that has turned so many of her 1960s contemporaries into permanent fixtures on the panel stage.
So when the actress surfaced in the news this week on the occasion of her 86th birthday, a whole generation of streaming viewers went looking for the woman behind one of the most quietly subversive careers in American film.
You know her even if you think you don't.
She's Elaine Robinson, the runaway bride who nearly steals *The Graduate* out from under Dustin Hoffman.
She's Etta Place, riding alongside Paul Newman and Robert Redford in *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*.
She's the reason a certain generation of movie fans still argues about whose name should have been above the title.
What makes Ross's story trend with younger viewers, though, is the part that plays like a plot twist.
After a run of major studio hits in the late '60s and early '70s, she turned down projects that would have kept her squarely in the spotlight and chose smaller, stranger films instead — including the 1975 horror cult classic *The Stepford Wives*, a movie that has aged into one of the sharpest satires of the era.
Her personal life reads like a Hollywood history syllabus.
She was married to Joel Fabiani, then to John Marion, then to Conrad Hall, the legendary cinematographer.
In 1984 she married Sam Elliott, and the two have been together ever since — one of the longest-running marriages in an industry that practically runs on breakups.
Elliott has spoken publicly about how deliberately they built a life away from the noise, splitting time between Los Angeles and a ranch in Oregon.
The couple's IMDB pages tell a story of a different kind of ambition.
Ross kept working steadily but selectively: *The Colbys* in the 1980s, a memorable turn in the 2001 Donnie Darko, voice work, and a steady stream of indie projects.
That's the part resonating on social media right now.
In an era where every actor of a certain vintage is expected to show up for a reboot, a comic-book cameo, or a teary documentary, Ross has stayed almost entirely off the grid.
There is no redemption arc, because she never needed one.
For younger viewers discovering her through streaming — *The Graduate* sits on several platforms, and *Butch Cassidy* cycles through the classics rotation constantly — the appeal is obvious.
She's not a movie star performing stardom.
She's an actress who treated the work as work and the rest of her life as her own.
That feels radical now in a way it probably didn't in 1967.
The birthday tributes that popped up online this week were mostly the same: gratitude, surprise that she's still with us and still private, and a lot of people admitting they had no idea she and Sam Elliott had been married for four decades.
There's something refreshing about a Hollywood figure whose legacy doesn't depend on being visible.
Ross gave us the performances, then declined to give us the performance of being a legend.
Final Thoughts
If that keeps her trending every few years when a birthday rolls around, that seems like exactly the trade she'd make.