Doreen Ramus

Doreen Ramus
[[File:|200pxpx|Doreen Ramus]]
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Portrays:	Elderly Woman
Date of Birth:	July 28,1926
Date of Death:	February 3, 2018
Age at Death:	91
Nationality:	UK
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Doreen Mildred Ramus (née Blyth; 28 July 1926 - 3 February 2018) was an English-born actress, registered nurse, and community theatre figure who portrayed the Elderly Woman in the Caprica episode "Unvanquished" (2010). Born in Milton Lilbourne, Wiltshire, England, she trained as a nurse and emigrated to Canada in 1952, eventually settling with her husband, Ken Ramus, in Garibaldi Highlands, near Squamish, British Columbia, where she worked for decades as a background and character actress in Vancouver-area film and television productions while also pursuing a long parallel career as a community theatre organizer.

Career

Screen career

Ramus worked as a background and character actress in film and television productions shot in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, from the early 1980s to 2012, almost always cast as an elderly woman. Her earliest documented screen role was Mrs. McCarthy in the television film The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (1983). She went on to appear in 21 Jump Street (1989) and the television film Quarantine (1989), and played the Old Woman on Bus in the television film To Grandmother's House We Go (1992).

Through the late 1990s and 2000s she accumulated further small roles, including in Da Vinci's Inquest (1999), Scary Movie (2000), in which she played the Old Lady in Theatre, Alice, I Think (2006), Stargate SG-1 (2007), Smallville (2007), on which she played the Daily Planet Mail Delivery Lady in the episode "Gemini," Gym Teacher: The Movie (2008), and Reaper (2009).

In 2010 Ramus took three further guest roles in genre television, appearing as an Old Lady in Supernatural, as the Elderly Woman in Caprica, and as the Elderly Neighbor in the Human Target episode "Embassy Row." She closed out her screen career with roles in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (2011), the television series Endgame (2011), The Big Year (2011), and Girl in Progress (2012).

Stage work

In 1965, Ramus co-founded the Howe Sound Drama Club, also known as the Howe Sound Players, in Squamish. The club's first production was Aladdin in 1966, and over the following 35 years, concluding with Camelot in 2000, it staged "approximately 90 plays and musical theatre events," drawing an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people into performing and behind-the-scenes roles across Squamish, Brackendale, Britannia Beach, Woodfibre, Whistler, and Pemberton.

She remained active in local theatre into her late eighties, including a 2013 turn as Lady Cravenshire in a production of Calendar Girls staged by Between Shifts Theatre; a tribute published in the Squamish Chief recalled that she would "garner huge applause just for walking on stage." In April 2014, the Squamish community held a fundraising tribute event, billed as the "Doreen Ramus Roast," in support of a history project documenting the Howe Sound Drama Club.

Personal life

Ramus trained as a nurse and midwife at the Royal East Sussex Hospital in Hastings, England, from 1946 to 1949, completing four years of nursing and midwifery training in total. In a 1994 letter to the Tunbridge Wells Courier seeking out former training-school friends, she signed as Doreen M. Ramus and gave her maiden name as Doreen Blyth.

In 1952, Ramus sailed from Glasgow to Montreal aboard a merchant navy vessel, landing in Canada as what she later described as a "landed immigrant." She soon found nursing work at the Montreal Neurological Institute, joining a research team under neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield studying the causes and treatment of epilepsy. She and a travelling companion later worked as paid delivery drivers, taking a new Chevrolet cross-country from a General Motors factory in Oshawa, Ontario, to the west coast by way of Hamilton, the Prairies, and Calgary before crossing into British Columbia.

She and her husband, Ken Ramus, settled in Garibaldi Highlands, where they were still living as of 1993. Their son, Bruce Ramus, married Lynne Ozone, of Maitland, Florida, in Cambridge, England, on 27 February 1993. Ken Ramus predeceased her in 1995. Ramus was also a founding member of the Squamish Writers Group and, in 2016, self-published a memoir, My Life's Journey, recounting her move from England to Canada.

Ramus died in the Squamish area on 3 February 2018, at age 91; a celebration of her life was held later that month at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park in Squamish.

References