Patricia Roc

Patricia Roc (7 June 1915 – 30 December 2003), born Felicia Miriam Ursula Herold, was a British film actress, popular in the Gainsborough melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and The Wicked Lady (1945), though she only made one film in Hollywood, Canyon Passage (1946). She also appeared in Millions Like Us (1943), Jassy (1945), The Brothers (1947) and When the Bough Breaks (1947).

Spouse(s

)Dr. Murray Laing (1939)
André Thomas (1949-54)
Walter Reif (1962-86)

Early life

The adoptive daughter of a Dutch-Belgian father, André Riese, a wealthy stockbroker, and a half-French mother, she was educated at private schools in London and Paris, before joining RADA in 1937. She did not learn that she was adopted until 1949.

Film career

Roc began as a stage actress, debuting in the 1938 London production of Nuts in May, in which she was seen by Alexander Korda who cast her in a leading role as a Polish princess in The Rebel Son.

She was employed by the studio of J. Arthur Rank, who called her "the archetypal British beauty" She achieved her greatest level of popularity in British films during the Second World War in escapist melodramas for Gainsborough Studios. She played prominent roles in some patriotic films of the period, such as Let the People Sing (1941) with Alastair Sim and We'll Meet Again (1943) with Vera Lynn. She co-starred with Phyllis Calvert, Jean Kent and Flora Robson as an internment camp inmate in Two Thousand Women (1944).

Love Story (1944) allowed her to play the jealous rival of Margaret Lockwood. She later commented that although they were required to slap each other's faces, she and Lockwood were always the best of friends. They played rivals in two subsequent films, The Wicked Lady (1944) and Jassy (1945). Roc's more overt sexuality in such films as The Wicked Lady was downplayed for the American market; her décolletage led US censors to call for retakes to de-emphasise it) and "the Goddess of Odeons", whilst Noël Coward said she was "a phenomenon" and "an unspoiled film star who can act". She played the central role in Millions Like Us, a powerful World War II film, made by Launder and Gilliat, which portrayed the changes that wartime wrought on the 'home front', starring alongside Gordon Jackson.

Her brief move to Hollywood to film Canyon Passage (1946) was a lend lease agreement between Rank Pictures and Universal Studios of British in return for American film actors. During filming, Roc was romantically linked with Ronald Reagan, while her US co-star Susan Hayward stated "that Limey glamour girl is a helluva dame."

In 1947 British exhibitors voted her the 6th most popular British star in the country. The following year she was 9th.

Roc returned to England later in the decade following the death of husband André Thomas. She produced only 3 more films and made a few television appearances (including the first episode of The Saint).

Personal life

Two weeks after the outbreak of war in 1939, Roc married Canadian-born Mayfair osteopath Dr Murray Laing, 12 years her senior. A possessive husband, who objected to his beautiful young wife kissing other men on screen, Laing soon had real cause for jealousy. While filming The Farmer’s Wife in 1941, Roc plunged headlong into a torrid affair with her co-star, Michael Wilding (who was later to marry Elizabeth Taylor). This hastened the collapse of his first marriage to the actress Kay Young. Her scandalous affairs with married men earned her the name of ‘Bed Roc’ within the film industry.

In Johnny Frenchman, the voluptuous Roc played opposite Ralph Michael, who was married to the actress Fay Compton, sister of the novelist and playwright Sir Compton Mackenzie. Roc embarked on yet another affair. Miss Compton, who never forgave her, divorced Ralph Michael, citing Roc, while Roc’s husband Murray Laing divorced her, citing Ralph Michael. After filming The Wicked Lady, in which, ironically, she played the ‘good girl’ to Margaret Lockwood’s villainess, Roc departed for Hollywood to star in the Western Canyon Passage. And there, in August 1945 on her second day in Tinseltown, she met Ronald Reagan over lunch at the famous Brown Derby restaurant. They had an intense affair and Reagan wanted to marry her. In 1947 she had an affair with the Scottish director David MacDonald who was directing her in the film The Brothers, causing the breakup of his marriage.

Roc married again in 1949 to André Thomas, a lighting cameraman, and moved to Paris where she started to work more and more in French and Italian cinema (along with a French-Canadian feature in Quebec). In 1952 Roc co-starred with the Rank Organisation’s ‘Mr Beefcake’ Anthony Steel, in the film Something Money Can’t Buy. Succumbing to what she described as Steel’s ‘animal magnetism’ (‘I’m afraid he was very, very good in bed’), she began an affair which resulted in the birth of a son, Michael. Her husband André, although knowing the child could not be his as he could not have children, accepted paternity, but suffered a massive stroke in 1956, and died at the age of 45.

She was married, a third and final time, to Walter Reif in 1962, and a year later retired. During her retirement, she moved to Locarno, where she later died of kidney failure.

In 1995, at the age of 80, she returned to London to attend the thanksgiving service for the life of her brother-in-law, tennis champion Fred Perry (whose third wife was her sister). Police had to rescue her when she was mobbed by hundreds of fans as she left St Paul’s Cathedral with her son.

Right to the end of her life, on December 30, 2003, she kept a photograph of Reagan and herself in the drawing-room of her Swiss home at Minusio, overlooking Lake Maggiore. It showed them gazing deeply into each other’s eyes.