Obituary

Patricia Roc

Rank starlet seen as the epitome of the English rose

The 1940s was a golden age for British female film stars, and Patricia Roc, who has died aged 88, was among the select group of attractive, terribly well-spoken actresses that included Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Valerie Hobson and Jean Kent. In many ways, the elegant Roc, more so than the others, seemed the epitome of the English rose.

She was born Felicia Miriam Ursula Herold in Hampstead, the daughter of a paper merchant. As a baby she was adopted by a wealthy Dutch-Belgian stockbroker, André Riese, and grew up believing him to be her real father. He had her expensively educated at a private school in Broadstairs, followed by a Paris finishing school, and then sent her to Rada in 1937. A year later, she appeared in a Guy Bolton revue, Nuts And May, at the Ambassadors. Alexander Korda gave Roc her first chance in films by casting her immediately in a leading role as the Polish Princess in the English-language version of the French film Tarass Boulba, retitled The Rebel Son.

After a few films as a lady in distress, including The Mind Of Mr Reeder (1939), an Edgar Wallace thriller starring Will Fyfe, Roc came into her own in patriotic films backing the war effort. She helped Alastair Sim fight the closing of a village hall in Let The People Sing (1941) and supported Vera Lynn, the Forces' Sweetheart, in We'll Meet Again (1942). Two weeks after the start of the war, Roc married a Mayfair osteopath, Murray Laing, a union that swiftly foundered. In Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's Millions Like Us (1943), Roc played the demure lower-middle-class girl who takes up work in a munitions factory and marries an airman (Gordon Jackson) who is killed in action.

Another effective Launder and Gilliat "people's war" picture was 2,000 Women (1944), in which Roc, with Phyllis Calvert, Jean Kent and Flora Robson, among others, keep their spirits up in a concentration camp.

There was also a great hunger for escapist melodramas, which Gainsborough Studios amply supplied. In Love Story (1944), Roc was happy to get away from "all those namby-pambies I played" when she appeared as concert pianist Margaret Lockwood's jealous rival for Stewart Granger's love. In one scene they had to slap each other's faces. "I didn't pull my punches, but then neither did she," Roc recalled. "But we were, and always remained, the best of friends."

Lockwood wrote in Roc's autograph book, "Love Story is the first picture we have made together and I have to sock you on the jaw, not once but twice - here's hoping that in our next we can be friends, not enemies."

That was not to be, because Love Story was the first of three films in which Lockwood and Roc vied for the love of a man, most famously in The Wicked Lady (1945) where Roc, back in the "nice girl" role, has her fiancé stolen from her by Lockwood, her best friend. When the film was shown in the US, there were objections to the amount of cleavage revealed by both women.

Two years later, in Jassy, another costume drama, Lockwood does the dirty on Roc again by pinching Dermot Walsh from her.

In 1946, Roc was the first contract player to be sent to Hollywood under J Arthur Rank's loan-out arrangements with Universal Studios. In Canyon Passage, a Western directed by Jacques Tourneur, she again loses the hero (Dana Andrews) to the bigger star (Susan Hayward). During her Hollywood stay, Roc was pursued and romanced by Ronald Reagan.

Back home, in The Brothers (1947), as a barefoot orphan girl in a Skye fishing village, she has her pick of men, causing superstition, sexual jealousy and tragedy. Yet she described her screen persona as "the bouncy, sexy girl next door that mothers would like their sons to marry and the sons wouldn't have minded".

Her career reached its peak in 1948 with When The Bough Breaks, the adoption movie that mirrored her own life, and the musical One Night With You, in which she met and fell in love with the French director of photography, André Thomas, who was to become her second husband. This led to her going to live with him in France, although she did make Something Money Can't Buy (1952) in England, where she and Anthony Steel play a young couple coming to terms with civilian life.

Thomas was unable to have children, which Roc wanted, and her affair with Steel resulted in the birth of a son, Michael, in Paris in 1952. Thomas accepted paternity and Michael was not told the truth about his father's identity until he was in his mid-40s. Roc remained in France, only returning to England after Thomas died in 1957. Here, she made the occasional film such as Bluebeard's Ten Honeymoons (1960) in which she is thrown off a railway bridge by George Sanders.

In 1964, she married the businessman Walter Reif and retired from acting. Known as Felicia Reif, Patricia Roc was all but forgotten until, in 1975, she hit the headlines when she was fined £25 for shoplifting from Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street. The psychological explanation offered was that it was a means of regaining the attention of the public. Soon after, she and her husband retreated to a house overlooking Lake Maggiore in Switzerland and were rarely tempted back to England, the scene of her triumphs in the 1940s. Reif died in 1986.

Patricia Roc is survived by her son, Michael, and younger sister, Barbara, the widow of the tennis champion Fred Perry.

· Patricia Roc, actor, born June 7 1915; died December 30 2003

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