The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945)

Patricia Roc as Caroline
Roc, Patricia [née Felicia Miriam Ursula Herold] (1915–2003), film actress, was born on 7 June 1915 at 75 Lissenden Mansions, Hampstead, London, the daughter of Felix Herold, a paper merchant, and his wife, Miriam Muriel, née Angell. Adopted while an infant by a Dutch stockbroker, André Magnus Riese, and his wife, she became known as Felicia Riese and only discovered her adoption in her thirties. She was brought up as the eldest of three Riese daughters; the middle sister Barbara (Bobby) married the tennis champion Fred Perry. She was educated at Francis Holland School, Regent's Park, then at Bartram Gables boarding school, Broadstairs, Kent, where she became head girl. With an aptitude for the arts she expressed an interest in acting and, after a year at a Paris finishing school in 1933–4, returned to England to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

Extremely pretty, slim, and dark-haired, with brilliant blue eyes, a winning smile, and natural manner, Felicia Riese (who adopted the stage name Patricia Roc) appeared in 1938 in the Guy Bolton revue, Nuts in May, at the Ambassadors Theatre, where she caught the attention of one of Alexander Korda's casting directors. She appeared first as an extra in The Divorce of Lady X (1938) before Korda cast her as the princess in The Rebel Son (1939). A period of good supporting roles quickly followed, where she honed her craft, with a notable appearance in A Window in London (1939). On 16 September 1939 she married a Canadian osteopath twelve years her senior, Murray Russell Laing, the son of William John Laing, businessman. The marriage quickly faltered when Roc fell in love with the actor Michael Wilding, with whom she was filming The Farmer's Wife (1940). She later recalled: ‘There was nothing to be done about it. We were both married. It was a mess’ (The Independent). Laing divorced her in 1944, citing the actor Ralph Michael (then married to the actress Fay Compton) as co-respondent.

Roc's breakthrough role came as Celia Crawson in Gainsborough's ‘home front’ movie Millions Like Us (1943), written and directed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. She was cast as the ingénue conscripted to factory work where she falls in love with a young airman (Gordon Jackson) and learns the values of stoicism upon his untimely death. The film, popular with wartime audiences, attracted considerable critical acclaim. Roc's career then flourished between 1943 and 1949 and she was quickly established as one of Britain's leading female stars, alongside Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert. Key roles followed in numerous Gainsborough melodramas such as 2,000 Women (1944), Love Story (1944), Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945), and The Wicked Lady (1945), where the cleavages displayed by Roc and her co-star Margaret Lockwood caused considerable headaches for the American censors.

Roc was the first British artist to travel to Hollywood under Rank's lend-lease agreement, to make Canyon Passage in 1946, and further fostered Anglo-American relations by her affair with Ronald Reagan. Her Hollywood experience was short-lived, however, and she returned to Britain and made The Brothers (1947), Jassy (1947), and When the Bough Breaks (1948), which earned her top billing for the role of an unmarried mother who reluctantly gives up her child for adoption. In 1949 she married the French director of photography André Thomas (d. 1954). Her film The Perfect Woman (1949) was the last under her existing Rank contract and she moved to Paris with Thomas. She returned to Britain in 1952 to star opposite Rank's ‘Mr Beefcake’, Anthony Steel, in Something Money Can't Buy. Her husband was unable to give her the children she desired but her affair with Steel resulted in the birth of her son Michael, for whom Thomas knowingly accepted paternity until his death in 1954. By this point Roc's career had waned and she made few films in the 1950s, her final feature being Bluebeard's Ten Honeymoons (1960). She had occasional television parts, most notably in The Saint with Roger Moore in 1962, but retired in 1964 after her marriage to the Viennese businessman and millionaire Walter Matias Reif (1911–1986), son of Hermann Reif, grain merchant, on 25 September that year. She briefly attracted press publicity in 1975 when she was arrested for shoplifting in Oxford Street, an event she attributed to forgetfulness. After this she and Reif moved to Switzerland. Suffering from kidney failure, she died in Locarno, Switzerland, on 30 December 2003. Her son, Michael Thomas, survived her.

Roc's success coincided with a period when a confident British film industry flourished. At the height of her fame her fan club supported The International Patricia Roc Fan Club Magazine and received 5000 letters each week. She was well liked within the industry: Noel Coward famously called her ‘a phenomenon, an unspoiled actress who can act’, while for her employer, J. Arthur Rank, she was the ‘Goddess of the Odeons’ (The Scotsman). More privately she was known as ‘bedrock’ for the sexual desire she inculcated in the male workforce at Rank (private information). Her description of herself as the ‘bouncy sexy girl next door’ (The Times) illustrates her awareness of her own star image, although she occasionally expressed impatience with her ‘good girl’ persona. Of her famous role as Caroline in The Wicked Lady she later recalled that ‘the character infuriated me. She was a saccharine-sweet little ninny’ (The Independent). Dilys Powell's assessment of her as ‘a trifle ritzy’ for the part of Celia in Millions (Powell, 39) suggests an alternative side to Roc that was only very occasionally developed, and some of her best performances were where she played more recalcitrant females. Her confident sparring with Margaret Lockwood in Love Story exploited the ‘rude feminine energy’ that Durgnat identifies as a feature of Roc and her Gainsborough peers (Durgnat, 185). Her role as a servant girl in The Brothers (her personal favourite) was her strongest and hints at a more complex personality: her character inspires sexual jealousy between two brothers and the film is tense and atmospheric. (Roc's sensual nude bathing scene in this film had to be cut for the American market.) Roc's failure to find continued success in the 1950s was in part due to changes in audience demographics that meant that female-orientated melodramas ceased production. New actresses such as Diana Dors emerged and Roc, now approaching forty, hadn't developed sufficiently as an actress to allow her to secure different and alternative roles. She was, however, one of the leading stars of British cinema in the 1940s, and the programme of her films at the National Film Theatre in 1999 is testimony to her central position in British film culture.

Melanie Bell-Williams

Sources P. Noble, ed., British Film Yearbook (1947–8) · Picturegoer, 18 (15 Jan 1949), 727 · R. Durgnat, A mirror for England: British movies from austerity to affluence (1970) · E. Braun, ‘Rank's young generation’, Films and Filming, 20/1 (Oct 1973), 32–40 · D. Powell, The golden screen: fifty years of films, ed. G. Perry (1989) · B. Babington, ed., British stars and stardom (2001) · The Times (31 Dec 2003) · Daily Telegraph (31 Dec 2003) · The Guardian (31 Dec 2003) · The Independent (31 Dec 2003) · The Scotsman (1 Jan 2004) ·

from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography