Ruta Lee

Born in Montreal, though raised in her teen years in Hollywood, actress Ruta Lee started her entertainment career on the far fringes of the business--she was an usherette and box office girl at the legendary movie palace Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Her career there was short-lived (she was fired), but her showbiz one has been anything but brief. Not long after being axed from her job, she landed an agent and was hired by MGM to costar in the musical feature film "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" as one of the available brides. She would appear in another classic Hollywood musical, "Funny Face," starring the riveting duo of Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. Although dance and music are major aspects of her talent, Lee also starred many times in Westerns on both the big and small screens, including roles in the Rat Pack shoot 'em up "Sergeants 3," "Bullet for a Badman," "Gunsmoke," and "Bonanza, to name a few. Her career in the Western genre would eventually be honored with a Lifetime Achievement award from the Motion Picture and Television Fund in 2002. Lee can also be seen in Alfred Hitchcock's "Witness for the Prosecution," "Elvis and the Beauty Queen," and "Marjorie Morningstar." In 1964, Lee generated plenty of news when she asked Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to release her elderly grandmother from a Siberian prison. He did, and her grandmother lived with Lee in California until the elderly woman died two years later.