Dark and sultry-looking, Rita La Roy was burlesque queen Taxi Belle Hooper in Josef Von Sternberg's The Blonde Venus (1932) and thus on the receiving end of some of Marlene Dietrich's more stinging barbs. The role should have been a breakthrough but most of her footage ended up on the cutting-room floor and she spent the remainder of her screen career playing catty and sometimes downright vituperative women in potboilers. The daughter, she claimed, of a French actress and a British nobleman, La Roy (born Ina Stuart) had been a dress designer and stock company actress prior to making her screen debut in 1929. The Delightful Rogue (1929), opposite matinee idol Rod La Rocque, earned her a contract with RKO and she played a femme fatale in Check and Double Check (1930), an attempt to turn radio's Amos 'n' Andy into viable screen stars and perhaps her most visible film today. "In movies just for the money," as she often stated, La Roy apparently never turned down a role, no matter how miniscule, and her subsequent career was mostly spent playing minor vamps in low-budget independent productions. She retired in 1943 but returned to the screen to play a fashion editor in You're My Everything (1949), a backstage musical from Fox.
by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
