The release of an autobiographical book, Consider Your Ass Kissed, is the latest achievement of Lithuanian American Hollywood star Ruta Lee. In the book, she talks about her life and rich career, as well as her encounters and friendships with movie stars.
For ten years, Ruta Lee had harboured the idea of putting her memories in the pages of a book. “People have told me that I have so many interesting stories. We all like gossip, at least a little gossip, but I never had the patience to sit down and do it,” the actress, who was finally persuaded to write a book by a good friend, acknowledged.
Reading the last draft of her memoirs, Ruta Lee said that she regretted not having talked more about her grandmother and her time in Siberia. “She was deported to Siberia with her husband, whose legs froze during a sixweek journey in cattle cars. When they took off his boots at the train station, the skin peeled off with them—gangrene had set in,” Ruta Lee said.
In her book, the Hollywood celebrity also talks about the phone call to Nikita Khrushchev. “After 12 years of trying to get my grandmother out of the Soviet Union legally, I had to do something very dramatic. And I succeeded. After this adventure, when my grandma finally arrived here –– at that time there were no closed exits from the planes leading to the airport –– this tiny 95-year-old woman fell to her knees, kissed the ground, and said in Lithuanian “Labas, Amerika [Hello, America],” the actress remembered the first minutes of her grandma in the USA.
The actress has made a spectacular career in Hollywood and has long been considered one of the brightest movie stars. However, one only has to look at her performance in “Marjorie Morningstar” or in the series “Perry Mason,” “Maverick”, and other projects from the golden age of television that made her a Hollywood star.