Warner Brothers’ security guards started using fire hoses on people. . . . That’s when I became a subversive character.

During World War II, actress Rose Hobart volunteered for a USO tour and spent a winter entertaining troops in Alaska. After the war she taught acting to returning GIs as part of an Actor’s Lab project. At a time when being outspoken was considered unpatriotic by some, Hobart’s involvement in the Actor’s Lab and her support of actors’ rights and improved working conditions led to the abrupt end of her career. Hobart lives at the Motion Picture and Television Country House in Woodland Hills.

I was born in New York City in 1906. My mother was an opera singer, and my father was first cellist in the New York Symphony. My sister and I were sent to boarding school because they were on tour. I never went to the same school two years running.

The schools tried to make me into a young lady, but I was always the rebel. At Knox School, an older girl kept wanting to ride piggyback. She wouldn’t get off, so I bit her on the arm. I almost got expelled, except there was no place to expel me to because Mother was on tour.

The reason I wanted to be an actress was that up in Woodstock, N.Y., where we spent our summers, they did a play by Edna St. Vincent Millay called “Aria da Capo,” the only play she ever wrote. She came to Woodstock because they were doing her play, and she was living in the cottage right next door. I hounded her like a puppy dog. I was about 6 or 7, I guess. There was a daisy field between the two cottages, and we would go sit in the daisy field and talk.

The very first play I did was “Liliom.” We opened in Atlantic City. On opening night there was a knock on my door, and Edna St. Vincent Millay walked in and said, “You made it!” I was 15.

When I came here to be in pictures, I’d been working in the theater in New York, where we had Equity to protect us. On my first three pictures, they worked me 18 hours a day and then complained because I was losing so much weight that they had to put stuff in my evening dress. I said, “If you let me have some sleep, maybe I wouldn’t lose weight.”

When I did “East Borneo,” that schlocky horror I did, we shot all night long. They started at 6 o’clock at night and finished at 5 in the morning. For two solid weeks, I was working with alligators, jaguars and pythons out on the back lot. I thought, “This is acting?” It was ridiculous. We were militant about the working conditions. We wanted an 8-hour day like everybody else.

When we came back from our USO tour in Alaska during the war, SAG was striking. So I went over to Warner’s to see what it was all about. Warner Brothers’ security guards started using fire hoses on people, and I thought, “This is too damned dirty. This, I cannot put up with.” So I began working politically, started making speeches. That’s when I became a subversive character.

I was on the board of the Screen Actors Guild at the time. I had to sign a paper saying I was not and never had been a Communist. But then I was brought up before the House Un-American Activities Committee because I was a member of the Actor’s Lab. They were out gunning for anybody that they considered subversive. We were all liberals, as far as I was concerned. We felt people were more important than businesses. And I still think they are.

I was in front of the committee from 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. It was awful. They came up with such as you could not believe. They were bringing up thing after thing, like, “Workers of the world, revolt,” with my name at the bottom. Every signature was in print. So I said to my lawyer, “I can prove to them that all of this is obviously not mine, because I never, never print my signature. I have a signature for autograph hounds and a signature for the banks, and neither one of them is printed. I said, “Why can’t I just say that to them?” And he said, “Not unless they ask you, don’t volunteer any information.”

My career just stopped right there. I haven’t worked in the picture business since. That was in 1949. The word went out from the studios. There was a blacklist. There really was.