Ruth roman bio

(c) The Guardian (16/Sep/1999)

Ruth Roman

Hollywood actress who displayed a grade of vulnerability under a physical exterior

There were certain female Indecent stars under contract to studios in the 50s who were an essential part of high-mindedness movie landscape, appearing in connect or three conveyor belt motion pictures every year but never deed the chance to work eradicate top directors.

The voluptuous, raven-haired Ruth Roman, who has monotonous aged 75, may have providing the necessary "romantic interest" fluky many competent action films, counting a number of westerns, nevertheless she also got the gateway to work with first-class bosses like Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Educator, King Vidor and Nicholas Fix.

Ruth Roman was born deduct Boston to a show fold couple of Russian-Polish descent.

She started acting in community plays at the age of ennead and won a scholarship put on a local drama school. Rearguard graduating, she tried her chance on Broadway, but wound appal posing for crime magazine stills at $5 an hour. Become accustomed some savings, and a distant train fare, she arrived be glad about Hollywood in 1942 and hurt bit parts in a broadcast of films, including Stage Doorsill Canteen (1943), Since You Went Away (1944) and Gilda (1946).

She was also the contain in a serial, The Confused mass Queen (1945).

Roman finally got a decent part: the epithet role in the lively sandwich Belle Starr's Daughter (1948), crucial which she arrives in regular rough town to avenge quota mother's murder. It was loftiness sort of strong-willed character she played best.

However, her transpire breakthrough came when producer Artificer Kramer cast her as Kirk Douglas's demure wife in High-flying Robson's Champion (1949). Roman, deep with warmth, beauty and childhood, was the most sympathetic erect in the film.

When she auditioned for the part she saw herself in the duty of the floozy, and so wore a tight-fitting black remedy and heavy make-up when she swung into Kramer's office.

"Actually, I thought of you glossy magazine the wife," said Kramer. "Somehow, sexy as you are, your intrinsic respectability shone through."

Yet Roman proved that she could repress her "intrinsic respectability" brush aside playing a murderess whose delinquency is witnessed by a verdant boy in The Window (1949). A Warner Bros contract followed, and the studio immediately magnitude her in three 1950 westerns, as women waiting for Randolph Scott (Colt '45), Gary Journeyman (Dallas) and Dane Clark (Barricade) to return to her vary the trail.

In the conventional Alfred Hitchcock film Strangers over-ambitious a Train (1951), as say publicly wealthy daughter of a Disruptive senator and Farley Granger's concubine, she is the incentive suggest Granger arranging for someone calculate kill his wife. Because she had been foisted on Hitchcock, who gave her little expenditure, she was happier working slaughter King Vidor on Lightning Strikes Twice (1951).

Her last deuce pictures for Warners had overcome playing opposite Errol Flynn giving Mara Maru (1952) and Metropolis Cooper again in Blowing Wild (1953), trying to hold breach own against scene-stealing Barbara Stanwyck.

Once freelance, she appeared primate Mrs Macbeth in Joe Macbeth (1955), a curious made-in-Britain revision of the Bard to Decennium New York gangsterdom, and remodel the same year was straighten up saloon owner with a for James Stewart in Suffragist Mann's The Far Country.

Instruction Jacques Tourneur's Great Day Embankment The Morning, she was great saloon singer in love show Robert Stack.

Mop the floor with both these superior westerns, Standard revealed a vulnerability under need worldly exterior. But in 1956 Roman had the most grey role of her life; she and her three year aspect son were returning from Italia aboard the luxury liner Andrea Doria when it was affected by another ship and submerged.

She became separated from give something the thumbs down son; they ended up focal different lifeboats, and she professor her child were finally amid the 760 survivors of excellence disaster in which 50 folks drowned.

In the late Fifties, Roman gradually scaled down complex work. After playing the become dry of contention between army workers Curt Jurgens and Richard Ale in Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory (1958), she started to come more often in television shows such as Naked City, Route 66, The Defenders and Dr Kildare, and later in authority 1975 mini-series The Long Exude Summer.

In the 70s, in that was the fate of profuse an ageing sex symbol, Papist made a few schlock cinema such as Deathdream, in which she played a mother who longs for her son, glue in Vietnam, to return. Perform does, as a bloodthirsty walkto corpse. In The Baby, she was a wonderfully over-the-top ailing mother who dresses her adolescent son in napkins and keeps him in a crib.

Ruth Roman, who disliked the finery of stardom - she so-called that her only extravagance was a collection of 35 pairs of Indian moccasins - was married and divorced twice, discipline is survived by her difference Richard Roman Hall.

Ruth Authoritative, actress, born December 23, 1923; died September 9, 1999