Sadly her father died when she was still a small child, forcing her mother to support the family by working as a waitress and cleaning woman.
She was raised in Boston and recalls her early days "in the Boston tenement district where I lived as a kid were lots of poor people. Many parents worked; the community settlement house helped take care of the kids. With mother working, I'd go there every afternoon after school. One of the house's projects was a series of one-act plays. I started acting in them at the age of nine, playing pixies and elves in things like Bridget and the Fairies. Of course, only the kids and our parents, who loved us, saw the shows”
She started to work as a model whilst still in her teens and also worked as a hatcheck girl to help pay for her drama lessons. Ruth studied at Bishop Lee Drama School and later became a member of Boston's New England Repertory Company.Whilst in Summer Stock she was spotted by an David O. Selznick agent and given $100 a week to spend on drama lessons.
At 18 she married Jack Flaxman but the marriage only lasted one year.
Ruth Roman headed to Holywood where she struggled - obtaining bit parts in several films before being cast in the title role in the thirteen-episode serial Jungle Queen (1945).
In 1949 Ruth brought a small house in Coldwater Canyon. She lived with several other struggling actresses in a Hollywood home known as 'the House of the Seven Garbos.
At this time her date was Ronald Reagan – the relationship was high profile enough for the future President to take her to the premiere of his film The Hasty Heart. Columnist Sheila Graham notes: "It could be the start of a beautiful friendship." But at the stage Ruth was playing the field.
A breakthrough role came in in the 1949 film, Champion. Ruth later recalled the 28 days she worked on this film as the happiest of her career with plenty of praise for the help Kirk Douglas gave her.
Ruth is picked by Look magazine as "The Big Time Movie Personality of 1950 and LIFE put her on its front cover.
Ruth married again in December 1950 to Mortimer Hall in Las Vegas, Nevada.. He was manager of Los Angeles radio station KLAC, which is owned by his mother, 47-year-old Dorothy Schiff, who's also owner and publisher of The New York Post. The family were very socially active in New York’s society.
Work was constant during the 1950’s with a string of pot boilers that kept her in the public eye – the only blots on the horizon was the re-release of Jungle Queen made in her struggling days and not something she wanted resurrected and the fact that her husband was dropped from New York Social Register. It's a taboo topic on the Warner lot commented one gossip.
In 1952 Ruth had her only child Richard Roman, "Dickie," is born in Santa Monica
Her marriage to Mortimer Hall came to a messy end in 1956. She married Las Vegas nightclub owner Budd Burton Moss at the El Panama in Panama City. He's 26; she's 33 but by 1960 the marriage was annulled as they had married before the divorce from her second husband had been granted.
In the 1960’s Ruth moved into tv drama and regional theatre and worked steadily throughout the sixties. The Magnicant Adah was one of her first transistional roles – fitting in with David Dortort’s plan to recruit famous names to introduce Bonanza to the audience.
cap by January
In the 1970’s she moved to Laguna Beach returning to do tv slots ‘to do something once in a while - a premiere or a TV guest shot - "to show people I'm not dead"Few stars struggled longer and harder for success than Ruth Roman- six years playing bit parts until she achieved stardom in 1949 and won a contract with Warner Bros.
In less than three years the studio had featured her in 10 films, but, although she starred opposite some of the top players of the time, including Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn and James Stewart, Ruth Roman was a leading lady rather than a major star, and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train was the only outstanding film she was to make at the studio.
She loved her profession, but her long struggle left her with no illusions. She told Hedda Hopper in 1949, "I love everything about show business, even the junk. You can't change the junk. People have tried. So you might as well accept it along with the good. Acting is my life. The profession can break my heart. In fact, it already has several times. But I love it."
Ruth Roman was to experience real-life drama when she and her son, then aged three, were aboard the luxury liner Andrea Doria when it was struck by another ship and wrecked.
In 1987 Roman made her first appearance on the series Murder, She Wrote, playing the gossipy owner of the town beauty salon, and she occasionally returned to the series to play the same role. Her last credited role was in Murder She Wrote in 1989.
Ruth died on the 9th September 1999 at her home in Laguna Beach and was cremated with her ashes scattered at sea.
Her death was reported world wide with many papers commenting that Ruth Roman, was a screen actress who parlayed her electrically charged combination of sexiness and wholesomeness.
sources
The Independent Newspaper
Wikipedia
IMbd
Goddesses of the Silver Screen
