The 1940s was a golden age for British female film stars, and Patricia Roc, was among the select group of attractive, terribly well-spoken actresses that included Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Valerie Hobson and Jean Kent. In many ways, the elegant Roc, more so than the others, seemed the epitome of the English rose.

After a year at RADA in 1937 she appeared in the revue, Nuts in May, at the Ambassadors, in which she was spotted by one of Sir Alexander Korda’s scouts. Korda gave Roc her first chance in films.

Roc came into her own in patriotic films backing the war effort. With Alastair Sim in Let The People Sing (1941) and Vera Lynn, in We'll Meet Again (1942), but the breakthrough came with Millions Like Us (1943), written and directed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat and widely regarded as the best film made during the war about the home front. Opposite Gordon Jackson, a young airman killed in action, she had the most sympathetic role and it made her a star overnight. 2,000 Women (1944) followed, with Phyllis Calvert, Jean Kent and Flora Robson.

There was also a great hunger for escapist melodramas, which Gainsborough Studios amply supplied. In Love Story (1944), Roc appeared as Margaret Lockwood's jealous rival for Stewart Granger's love. In one scene they had to slap each other's faces. "I didn't pull my punches, but then neither did she," Roc recalled. "But we were, and always remained, the best of friends."

Love Story was the first of three films in which Lockwood and Roc vied for the love of a man, most famously in The Wicked Lady (1945). When the film was shown in the US, there were objections to the amount of cleavage revealed by both women and some scenes had to be re-shot.

In 1946, Roc was the first contract player to be sent to Hollywood under J Arthur Rank's loan-out arrangements with Universal Studios. In Canyon Passage, a Western, she co starred with Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. During her Hollywood stay, Roc was pursued and romanced by Ronald Reagan.

Back home, in The Brothers (1947), her favourite role, she played a barefoot orphan girl in a Skye fishing village, causing mayhem amongst the straight laced fishermen. Yet she described her screen persona as "the bouncy, sexy girl next door that mothers would like their sons to marry and the sons wouldn't have minded either".

In her 40+ movies in a 20 year career, her co-stars included Sir Michael Redgrave, Sir John Mills, James Mason, Charles Laughton, Ray Milland and George Sanders. She married three times and died in December 2003 aged 88.

Patricia Roc is survived by her son, Michael, and younger sister, Barbara, the widow of the British tennis champion Fred Perry. Sadly she never met her grand daughter Steele Sapphire who was born 3 months premature in Sri Lanka in May 2006 and diagnosed with the serious sight threatening condition, Retinopathy of Prematurity and towards whose future special needs the proceeds of the sale will go.