New biography about British actress reveals secrets about Ronald Reagan

Claims Affair with her saved the future president from suicide

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British actress, Patrica Roc

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Since his death in 2004, Ronald Reagan has come to be regarded as one of the greatest presidents of the United States. Last year, President Obama said that the 40th president helped “to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics.”

Now, in a new biography ‘The Goddess Of The Odeons’ about Patricia Roc, a British star of the 1940s and 1950s, author Michael Hodgson makes startling revelations about the former B-movie actor turned politician. In the book, film historian Hodgson alleges that Reagan suffered a nervous breakdown with the collapse his marriage to movie star Jane Wyman in 1945, and a passionate affair with Roc was the only thing that saved him from committing suicide.

Hodgson says Roc’s private papers reveal her many scandalous affairs with married men, which earned her the nickname ‘Bed Roc’ within the film industry.

Roc’s relationship with Reagan began in Hollywood and continued in London, and if the actress had accepted Reagan’s proposal of marriage in 1948, Hodgson maintains there might have been an English First Lady in the White House.

Roc was born illegitimately in London in 1915 as Felicia Miriam Ursula Herold and was adopted by a wealthy Dutch-Belgian stockbroker. She grew up in a wealthy household, and after a year at a Paris finishing school, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The made her London stage debut at the age of 22 and in 1943, broke into major box-office stardom in ‘Millions Like Us.’

In 1939, she married Dr. Murray Laing, a possessive husband who was 12 years her senior and who objected to her kissing other men on screen. He soon had real cause to worry when Roc had an affair with co-star Michael Wilding while filming ‘The Farmer’s Wife’ in 1941. Other affairs followed.

In 1945, she left for Hollywood to star in ‘Western Canyon Passage.’ Two days after she arrived, she met Ronald Reagan at the famous Brown Derby restaurant.

Reagan had recently returned from the war, having served in the Army Air Corps, to find his movie star wife, Jane Wyman, was no longer interested in him.

“All I wanted to do,” he later wrote “was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. As it came out, I was disappointed in all these post-war ambitions.”

Roc was seriously alarmed by Reagan’s mental state.

“He was just wretched and miserable,” she said. “He adored his wife and family, and just couldn’t ¬understand why or how she had completely lost interest in him.

Had I been older, I suppose I would have realised that he was suffering a sort of breakdown, as he was quite often in tears and ¬dangerously depressed. He several times told me: ‘Life just isn’t worth living any more. I just don’t see the point of going on.’

“I became deeply fond of him, but rather as one becomes fond of a lost child. We became lovers because, quite frankly, I was scared and lonely on my arrival in Hollywood, and sex seemed the only thing to alleviate his utter misery.

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