Ruby Myers (Sulochana)

Origins and early life

Ruby Myers, known on screen as Sulochana, was born in 1907 into a Baghdadi Jewish family, one of the Jewish communities that had settled in Bombay and Poona from Iraq in the nineteenth century.

Work and career

She was working as a telephone operator when a director of the Kohinoor Film Company noticed her and offered her a part; she had no interest in acting at first and accepted only after being persuaded. Because respectable Hindu and Muslim women were then discouraged from appearing on screen, Jewish and Anglo-Indian actresses filled the leading roles of early Indian cinema, and she became the most prominent of them, taking the screen name Sulochana, which means beautiful-eyed.

In silent films such as Typist Girl, Wildcat of Bombay, in which she played eight roles, and Anarkali, she became the highest paid star of Indian cinema, reportedly earning more than the governor of Bombay. In the mid-1930s she set up her own studio, Rubi Pics, producing and starring in her own films, and she made the transition to sound by learning Hindustani and remaking her silent hits as talkies. Her career faded in the 1940s and she took supporting parts into the 1980s, living modestly in Bombay.

India gave her the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, its highest honour in cinema, in 1973, and she died in Bombay on 10 October 1983.