Patricia Roc - Personal Life

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 distinguished actress Fay Compton, sister of the novelist and playwright Sir Compton Mackenzie. ‘Bed Roc’ as she was known in the film industry, 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’), they 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 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.