Her first marriage had ended in 1944 when she was sued for
Posted in General on 06. Oct, 2010
Her first marriage had ended in 1944 when she was sued for divorce, her husband naming the actor Ralph Michael, then married to the actress Fay Compton, as co-respondent.After she played a glamour girl who takes the place of a robot look-alike in the fanciful farce The Perfect Woman (1949), Roc’s contract with Rank ended and she went to live in Paris with her husband. She had a good, though not starring, role in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), starring Charles Laughton as Simenon’s sleuth Maigret, and worked with Jacques Tourneur again on the thriller Circle of Danger (1951) with Ray Milland.Returning to Rank, she starred with Anthony Steel in the comedy drama Something Money Can’t Buy (1952), about a young couple’s problems adjusting to post-war life. She was then top-billed in When the Bough Breaks (1947), which had the familiar soap-opera plot of an unwed mother who gives her child up for adoption but later wants him back. It was given distinction by the truthful performances of Roc and Rosamund John as the women involved, and by the director Laurence Huntingdon’s lively and accurate depiction of working-class life at the time – Roc’s heroine works behind the counter of a department store and holidays at Butlins.While making a disappointing musical, One Night With You (1948), with the Italian singer Nino Martini, Roc fell in love with the French director of photography, Andr?homas, whom she married the following year. It was Roc’s own favourite of her films.She was an orphan again in the mill-town saga So Well Remembered (1947), a multi-generation tale starring John Mills and earnestly directed by Edward Dmytryk from James Hilton’s novel.
The rivalry that ensues for her affections leads to murder, suicide and ritual killing in the highly superstitious community. The grim tale’s heady atmosphere was reminiscent of Charles Laughton’s later Night of the Hunter, and like that film The Brothers was not popular at the time but has since gained in reputation. Roc had returned to one of her most challenging roles, that of a tempestuous orphan who in 1900 becomes servant to a crofting family on Skye in David Macdonald’s The Brothers (1947). The only time I had any respect for her was when she lost her temper and walloped Margaret Lockwood across the face.Roc journeyed to Hollywood (under a lend-lease deal the studio head J.
Arthur Rank had with Universal Pictures) to take a leading role in Walter Wanger’s production Canyon Passage (1946). The film, directed by Jacques Tourneur, was a fine offbeat western but Roc’s part was a thankless one, overshadowed by that of Wanger’s contract star Susan Hayward.While in the US, Roc began a romance with Ronald Reagan, which resumed when he came to the UK to make The Hasty Heart the following year. Roc, though, was not happy with her role of the virginal heroine whose fianc?s stolen by the restless Lockwood, who moonlights as a highwayman: The character infuriated me. She was a saccharine-sweet little ninny who stood back and allowed another woman to snatch her lover. The film was loathed by critics and loved by the public, as was Love Story (1944), in which Roc played the fianc?of an engineer (Stewart Granger) who is going blind and who in turn falls in love with a concert pianist (Margaret Lockwood) with only a few months to live.After the wartime drama Johnny Frenchman (1945) Roc starred with Lockwood and Mason in The Wicked Lady, which was to be the top box- office draw of 1946 in the UK. The incredibly youthful-looking Roc was able to play Calvert’s daughter though only four months her junior. The enormously popular melodrama Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) had a sterling cast of the studio’s top players, including Roc, Stewart Granger, Jean Kent and Dulcie Gray, but the film belonged to Phyllis Calvert as Roc’s mother, a respectable wine merchant’s wife whose split personality makes her run off and become a gypsy.
The critic Richard Winnington wrote, In the inarticulate wooing and marriage of a young English worker (Patricia Roc) and a sergeant air-gunner (Gordon Jackson) the faltering accents of true love are almost drowned by the roar of bombers and machinery. This is so far the outstanding love passage in war films.In Launder’s 2,000 Women (1944), Roc and Phyllis Calvert were inmates of an internment camp in France, secretly assisting the underground. He was 12 years older than me, and, like so many marriages at that time, it just didn’t work out.Roc’s film career continued with roles in Pack Up Your Troubles (1940), John Baxter’s Let the People Sing (1942), a stolid version of J.B. Priestley’s novel, and We’ll Meet Again (1942), which starred the singer Vera Lynn in a story loosely based on her own rise to radio fame.