Beautiful RUTH ROMAN  was a versatile actress

In two of her most famous films: The Window (1949), she plays a murderer and in  Strangers On A Train (1951), as FARLEY GRANGER’s fiancée, she is high-class and elegant.  

I remember her in ‘Lightning Strikes Twice’ with Richard Todd – not a particularly good film and maybe not the best of parts for Ruth

RUTH ROMAN was born Norma Roman on December 22, 1922, in Lynn, Massachusetts, Nr Boston. Ruth’s father died when she was eight, and her mother was forced to move her and her two sisters, Ann and Eve, to Boston’s West End tenement district. Mrs. Roman took on menial jobs to keep the family afloat. They moved often because they couldn’t afford the rent.

Mrs. Roman created a loving home for her girls, and as Ruth would later say, “It wasn’t dreary at all. When you start out poor, you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ve never met a family, rich or poor, who had a happier life than we did together.”

Ruth started acting at school. She knew this was her destiny. After two years of high school, she dropped out to pursue her career full-time.

She worked as a Cinema usherette during the day while working at the New England Repertory Company at night. For three years, she appeared in small roles and worked as a stagehand.

Ruth was determined to learn  

Ruth then set out to try her luck on Broadway but she struggled there for three years with no luck.

In the meantime, she paid the rent by working as a waitress, babysitter, salesgirl, and other odd jobs. She then got a break in 1942 when she won a small role in the musical film Stage Door Canteen (1943), which was filmed in New York.

Everyone of note seemed to be in this film. With the money she made for her four days of filming, Ruth bought herself a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where her luck would change. 

ABOVE – One of her first breaks – this time in a Serial with her in the title role – ‘Jungle Queen’

Some time later Ruth got a good part – the title role in the lively western Belle Starr’s Daughter (1948), in which she arrives in a rough town to avenge her mother’s murder.

However, her real breakthrough came when producer Stanley Kramer cast her as Kirk Douglas’s wife in Mark Robson’s Champion (1949).

A Warner Bros contract followed, and the Studio immediately cast her in three 1950 Westerns, opposite Randolph Scott (Colt ’45), Gary Cooper (Dallas) and Dane Clark (Barricade).

Ruth was also in a favourite of mine ‘ Tanganyika’ – a film that doesn’t often see the light of day unfortunately but it is a good action packed adventure

Van Heflin and Ruth Roman star. Ruth Roman looks very beautiful in those African locations – in fact the locations were Studio Sets on the backlot of Universal in Hollywood with some location work in the US plus stock footage – but to me, it all works pretty well.

In 1956 Roman had the most exciting role of her life; she and her three year old son were returning from Italy aboard the luxury liner Andrea Doria when it was struck by another ship and sunk.

She became separated from her son =- they ended up in different lifeboats, and she and her child were finally among the 760 survivors of the disaster in which 50 people drowned.

In the late 1950s, Ruth Roman gradually scaled down her work. After appearing with Curt Jurgens and Richard Burton in Bitter Victory (1958), she started to appear more often in television shows such as Naked City, Route 66, The Defenders and Dr Kildare, and later in the 1975 mini-series The Long Hot Summer.

Ruth Roman, disliked the trappings of stardom – she claimed that her only extravagance was a collection of 35 pairs of Indian moccasins.

TANGANYIKA 1954

Van Heflin and Ruth Roman star but there seems little chemistry between them although Ruth Roman looks very beautiful in those African locations – in fact the locations were Studio Sets on the backlot of Universal in Hollywood with some location work in the US plus stock footage – but to me, it all works pretty well.

I must have said this before, but again this is a film I saw many years ago in St. Albans where we always holidayed and stayed with my Mother’s family. So it would be shown at either The Odeon on London Road, The Gaumont or The Chequers – the Odeon is now the wonderful Odyssey Cinema after being saved from extinction by the local hard working community

The film made in Hollywood by Universal Pictures, TANGANYIKA (1954) takes place in 1903 in the territory of East Africa

The story is of a hunt for a fugitive white man who’s stirred up the a tribe of natives into making raids on white settlements. Directing the hunt is John Gale (Van Heflin) who leads a group of native porters from East Africa into Tanganyika.

On the way he picks up Peggy Marion (Ruth Roman), a schoolteacher from Canada, and her young niece and nephew (Noreen Corcoran, Gregory Marshall), after rescuing them from a native attack that killed Peggy’s brother. He also picks up a wounded white man, Dan Harder (Howard Duff) who, we learn early on, is the brother of the renegade white man, although he keeps that little fact a secret.