Susan Roces, movie fan

ROCES. Remarkable poise and dignity.

When Susan Roces told me that it was the movie fan in her that lured her to an “open house” at the Sampaguita Pictures studio when she had just graduated from high school, I couldn’t quite believe her.

“I’ve never seen the movie fan in you,” I told her. “Even from our very first meeting at the studio, you already looked like a movie star, all set to conquer the world!”

Barely two years after she entered Tinseltown, Susan made a big splash by taking a 36-hour flight across the Pacific as the Philippine delegate to the Pacific Festival in San Francisco, California.

They couldn’t stop talking about her remarkable poise and dignity, so unusual in one so young (she was only 17), and above all, her winning the hearts of everyone with her natural sweetness everywhere she went.

—Where was the movie fan in all this?

“While I was finishing high school at La Consolacion College in Bacolod,” Susan reminisced, “I never missed a movie starring my favorites—Gloria Romero, Luis Gonzalez, Ric Rodrigo and Nida Blanca. But, I had no intention to become one of them.”

She came to Manila to enroll at La Consolacion College. But, the movie fan in her could not resist going to the open house at Sampaguita Pictures, where she could see her favorite stars in person. She went with her aunt, Tessie Alava, and a couple of friends.

“Everything was so beautiful to me!,” Susan recalls. “But, I didn’t know that somebody was also—looking at me!

“When he came toward me, Aunt Tessie whispered, ‘That’s Doc Perez.’ I didn’t know whom she was talking about.”

“‘Gusto mo bang mag-artista?,’ he aked me directly. Unprepared, I couldn’t answer. It was Tessie who answered for me, saying, ‘Mahilig po ‘yan, lumalabas siya sa mga school play!’”

Doc Perez gave Susan a screen test the next morning, and she passed—with flying colors! Not only did she impress the Vera Perez family, but also directors, Mar S. Torres and Carlos Vander Tolosa.

Values

“My first four years in Sampaguita was like being in a finishing school. All I did was absorb all the new things that I was exposed to. I was lucky that the values that were applied in Sampaguita were almost exactly the same ones I learned at home.”

“I was a big fan of Gloria Romero. The first time we shook hands, my hand was cold. I behaved exactly like a movie fan!”

Only by being a movie fan can you truly understand why they behave “differently,” as they do sometimes, and you love them all the more for it—for being human, like yourself!