Trivia

Lee is chairman of The Thalians, an organization for the treatment of mental health at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Debbie Reynolds was the president. Both have been actively involved in building this celebrity-run organization for over 30 years.

She and her husband were married 44 years until his death.

She and her husband own several houses scattered across the United States. In her acting travels, she stays at these different houses for varied periods of time. About her house-hopping travels she jokes, "I sleep around.".

Inducted into the Lithuanian American Hall of Fame in 2013.

She loves it when fans remember her Twilight Zone episode, A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain (1963).

Attended Los Angeles City College and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Attended and graduated from Hollywood High School in Los Angeles, California (1954).

The only child of two Lithuanian immigrants. Her father was a tailor and her mother was a seamstress and homemaker.

In 1964, she made international headlines by flying to Lithuania to obtain the freedom of her ailing grandmother. Soviet officials had steadfastly refused 88-year-old Ludvise Kamandulis to leave her Iron Curtain home to spend her remaining years in California with her actress granddaughter.

Ruta Lee is credited using her birth name, "Ruta Kilmonis".

From the 60s, developed a lucrative sideline as an artist, some her her oil paintings being much sought-after.

Lee told Illeana Douglas in her podcast, "Popcorn Talk, The Movie Scene," that her star on the Walk of Fame at Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the ticket booth where she once briefly worked, before being let go for an inadvertent deficit of forty dollars, was "karmic revenge.".

In 1948, her family moved to Los Angeles to escape the cold Canadian winters.

Has a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.

An avid animal lover.

1957 Hollywood Deb Star.