Vera Hruba Ralston, 79; Czech Ice-Skating Star Turned Film Actress

Vera Hruba Ralston, the Czech-born ice-skating star whose B-movie career at Republic Pictures in the 1940s and ‘50s never equaled her performances on the ice, has died.

Ralston died Sunday of cancer at her home in Santa Barbara at age 79, said her husband, Charles Alva.

As Vera Hruba (pronounced roo-bah), Ralston was a featured attraction with the Ice Capades when she caught the attention of Herbert J. Yates, the head of Republic Pictures.

In 1941, he featured Ralston and the other members of the company in “Ice-Capades,” a musical built around their skating acts. The studio followed it up a year later with “Ice-Capades Revue.”

In 1943, Ralston signed a long-term contract with Republic, where she became the married Yates’ protege and later his wife.

In a relationship often likened to that between William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, the sixtysomething Yates took a personal interest in turning the twentysomething Ralston into a star.

As Republic’s answer to 20th Century Fox’s Olympic gold medalist-turned actress Sonja Henie, the B-movie studio’s new discovery was billed as Vera Hruba Ralston, who “skated out of Czechoslovakia into the hearts of America.”

Her first leading role was in “The Lady and the Monster,” a 1944 thriller co-starring Erich von Stroheim and Richard Arlen. Over the next 14 years, she appeared in 23 other Republic films, including “Lake Placid Serenade,” “Storm Over Lisbon,” “I, Jane Doe,” “Dakota,” “The Fighting Kentuckian,” “The Plainsman and the Lady” and “Fair Wind to Java.”

She added the surname Ralston -- taken from the name of a popular breakfast cereal -- because Americans had difficulty pronouncing Hruba. By 1946, after Hruba had been frequently misspelled on theater marquees, she was being billed simply as Vera Ralston.

Although Yates lavished money and attention on Ralston’s films and career, most of her movies fared poorly at the box office.

Early reviews mention her woodenness and less-than-ideal command of the English language. But although her English and her acting soon improved, she never lost her Czech accent. “It was,” she once said, “something I just couldn’t lose, no matter how hard I tried.”

Joseph Kane, who directed Ralston in a dozen films, once said in an interview that, given her relationship with Yates, “she could have made it rough on everyone,” but she “never took advantage of that situation.” Although Kane thought that Ralston never became a good actress, he said she was cooperative, hard-working and eager to please.

The daughter of a wealthy jeweler, Ralston was born in Prague in 1923. Biographical sources list her birth year variously as 1919, 1920 and 1921. But Ralston, who reportedly assumed that she was born in 1920, discovered otherwise in 1973 when, after a four-year battle with the bureaucracy in Prague, she received an official copy of her birth certificate, listing 1923 as her birth year.

Around age 10, she turned her attention from studying ballet to figure skating. Within a few years, she was a local champion and a British gold medal winner. She skated in the 1936 Olympics.

Ralston, who married Yates in 1952, retired from the screen in 1958, the year he was deposed from the studio in a proxy fight.

Yates died in 1966 at 85. Ralston inherited half of his estimated $10-million estate and later moved full time to the oceanfront house they had bought in the mid-1950s in the Hope Ranch section of Santa Barbara. She married Alva in 1973.

A private graveside service was held Friday. A Mass for Ralston will be held at 10 a.m. today at San Roque Catholic Church, 325 Argonne Circle, Santa Barbara.