Jean Ruth

Jean Ruth (September 10, 1917 – September 18, 2004) was an American actress and radio personality born in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The daughter of Davis Clifford Ruth and Evelyn Read Hillyer, she completed her secondary education at Monrovia High School in 1935 and went on to earn a degree from the University of Colorado in 1941.

Ruth built a career that spanned stage, radio, and film. Her Broadway work included a 1943 appearance in Oklahoma!, which was produced in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her radio activity during the same period proved equally significant: broadcasts she made between 1941 and 1944 during World War II served as the basis for the musical film Reveille with Beverly. She later recalled that during those wartime broadcasts she was sometimes directed to announce the titles of songs that did not actually exist, a practice she understood to have functioned as coded messages to the French Resistance.

On screen, Ruth is perhaps most recognized for her role in the Martin and Lewis comedy At War with the Army, released in 1950. Her wartime experiences also shaped her personal connections in later life; she became a friend of Iva Toguri, the Japanese-American radio announcer who faced prosecution for treason over broadcasts made from Tokyo during the war.

In her personal life, Ruth was married to swing and boogie-woogie pianist and bandleader Freddie Slack. The marriage lasted from 1945 to 1948. She died on September 18, 2004, eight days after her eighty-seventh birthday.