Ruth Roman in Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)

West German postcard by Kunst und Bild, Berlin, no. A 429. Photo: R.K.O. Ruth Roman in Lightning Strikes Twice (King Vidor, 1951).

In a career of five decades. American actress Ruth Roman (1922–1999) transitioned flawlessly from ingénue to leading lady to character actress. She is memorable as the murderous villain in the classic Film Noir The Window (1949) and as Farley Granger's elegant girlfriend in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Strangers on a Train (1951).

Ruth Roman was born Norma Roman in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1922. Her Lithuanian Jewish parents were Mary Pauline (née Gold) and Abraham 'Anthony' Roman. Her mother was a dancer, and her father a barker in a carnival sideshow that they owned at Revere Beach, Massachusetts. She had two older sisters, Ann and Eve. She was renamed 'Ruth'; when a fortune-teller told her mother that 'Norma' was an unlucky name. Her father died when Ruth was eight. Her mother sold the sideshow and supported the family by working as a waitress and cleaning woman. As a girl, Ruth pursued her dream to become an actress by enrolling in the prestigious Bishop Lee Dramatic School in Boston. Roman moved to New York City, where she hoped to find success on Broadway. Instead, she worked as a cigarette girl, a hat check girl at a night club and a model for a crime magazine to make a living and save money. After playing stage roles on the East Coast, Roman moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in films. She appeared in several uncredited bit parts before she was cast as the leading lady in the Western Harmony Trail (Robert Emmett Tansey, 1944) opposite Ken Maynard. She was cast in the title role in the thirteen-episode serial Jungle Queen (Lewis D. Collins, Ray Taylor, 1945). Roman's career began to improve in the late 1940s when she was cast in a featured role in Good Sam (Leo McCarey, 1948) starring Gary Cooper. She first starred in the title role of Belle Starr's Daughter (Lesley Selander, 1948). She achieved her first notable success with a role as a murderess in the Film Noir The Window (Ted Tetzlaff, 1949) both a critical success and a box office hit. She played another important role as the dependable wife of the fighter (Kirk Douglas) in the boxing drama Champion (Mark Robson, 1949). A year later she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress for her performance. She was under contract to Warner Bros., where she starred in a variety of films. Look Magazine billed her as the 'Big Time Movie Personality of 1950', and by the following year, she was receiving some 500 fan letters per week. In Three Secrets (Robert Wise, 1950), she played a distraught mother waiting to learn whether or not her child survived an aeroplane crash. In one of her most memorable roles, Roman co-starred with Farley Granger and Robert Walker in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train (1951).

In the mid-1950s, Ruth Roman left Warner Bros. At Universal, she was the love interest to James Stewart in the Western The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1955). She continued to star in films and began playing guest roles in television series. She also worked abroad and made films in England, Italy, and Spain. In 1956, Ruth Roman and her son Dickie boarded the Italian passenger liner SS Andrea Doria for a trip from France to the US. On a night, the Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger liner MS Stockholm. When the collision happened Roman immediately took off her high heels in the lounge and scrambled back to her cabin barefoot to retrieve her sleeping son. Several hours later the passengers were being evacuated from the sinking liner. Dickie was lowered first into a waiting lifeboat, and before Roman could follow the lifeboat departed. Ruth stepped into the next boat and was eventually rescued along with 750 other survivors from the Andrea Doria by the French passenger liner SS Ile de France. Dickie was rescued by the Stockholm and was reunited with his mother in New York. She played the woman between British Army officers Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens in the World War II drama Amère victoire/Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957). In 1959, she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. Although she never achieved the level of success as a leading lady that many predicted, Roman worked regularly in film well into the 1960s. Ruth had made the transition to middle-aged character parts and began to appear mostly on television in shows like The Outer Limits (1963), Mannix (1967), Gunsmoke (1955), and (in a recurring role) in The Long, Hot Summer (1965). She also toured with theatrical productions of 'Plaza Suite', 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf', and 'Two for the Seesaw'. Her final theatrical film was the thriller Impulse (William Grefé, 1974), starring William Shatner. Her last screen appearance was in the TV series Murder She Wrote (1989) with Angela Lansbury. Ruth Roman died at the age of 76 in Laguna Beach, California, in 1999. Roman was married four times. She had one son, Richard Roman Hall (1952) with husband Mortimer Hall.

Sources: Wikipedia Dutch, German and English) and IMDb.

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Taken on: May 17, 2024

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