This film and TV star who worked with legends like Sinatra has Fort Worth in her heart
Fort Worth is full of new TV and movie stars, and sometimes we forget old friends.
In a city where frequent visitor Ethan Hawke just wrapped up the Lone Star Film Festival and hometown sensation Taylor Sheridan has networks’ No. 1 hit in “Yellowstone,” long-ago guest Ruta Lee returns Sunday with her fame growing again.
Don’t believe me? Google her.
At 86, Lee is gaining new followers thanks to movie streaming and also to a new book of remembrances about a Hollywood career acting alongside everyone from Frank Sinatra to Andy Griffith, leading charity benefits alongside Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher and co-hosting a game show with the late Alex Trebek.
Before Fort Worth became famous as the birthplace of Kelly Clarkson or the late Bill Paxton, we were known as a second home for Lee. The resilient TV star was a frequent headliner in the long-ago days of summer musicals at Casa Mañana Theatre.
“Fort Worth is the most beautiful gift I could ever have been given,” said Lee, back this weekend in a city she first saw at 29 from the rooftop of what is now the Courtyard/Blackstone hotel downtown.
She devoted an entire chapter in the book to Fort Worth. She will sign copies and visit at a reception from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday in Casa’s orignal 1958 lobby, 3101 W. Lancaster Ave. (Reserve a place at casamanana.org.)
That first day in 1964 when she arrived, the old Fort Worth Press newspaper splashed a photo across its front page of Lee opening her arms wide open toward the city skyline with the caption, “ ‘Hello, Fort Worth!’ “
It was the beginning of repeated appearances on Casa’s stage and in the old showbiz pages of the Press and the Star-Telegram. Columnists Elston Brooks, Jack Gordon, Tony Slaughter and Perry Stewart celebrated her as the city’s leading honorary citizen, along with world-renowned pianist Van Cliburn.
She writes in the book: “I owe a debt of gratitude to the Fort Worth press icons,” naming the newspaper columnists and also 70-year TV reporter and movie critic Bobbie Wygant of what is now KXAS/Channel 5.
“I fell in love with Fort Worth and thankfully the feeling was mutual,” Lee writes.
She was invited back “next year and the next and the next ... for some forty years.”
Even decades later, during a lobster dinner last week at a restaurant on Camp Bowie Boulevard, she was repeatedly interrupted by patrons who saw her and rushed to the table shouting: “Ruta!”
She credits her resurgent popularity to movie streaming and the Turner Classic Movies network, where her 1954 debut “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” turns up often, along with “Sergeants 3,” which co-stars Lee and Sinatra.
But she also shows up repeatedly in TV reruns on streaming services, playing roles on Lucille Ball’s and Andy Griffith’s shows, along with “Perry Mason,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Gunsmoke.”
In 1974, she co-hosted the NBC game show “High Rollers” with newbie Trebek, who became a lifelong friend.
That’s all in the book, provocatively titled “Consider Your Ass Kissed!” (Briton, 284 pages, $36.99).
She described the title as a blunt but innocent thank-you to everyone who’s ever seen her movies or shows or donated to one of her many philanthropies, including the Thalians mental-health charity she led with Reynolds.
She said: “Anyone who’s donated, anyone who’s given their time and money to a cause — what else can I say?”
Her book covers the end of the “Golden Age” of Hollywood and the beginning of the television age. But it also recounts her Cold War effort phoning the Soviet Union and then-Premier Nikita Khrushchev to ask for the release of her Lithuanian grandmother from a Siberian internment camp. She was eventually freed and came to the U.S.
“It would make a great series,” she said. “It’s an incredible story.”
I get the feeling she still has more stories to tell.
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 1:00 PM.
