Roekiah

Roekiah (Perfected Spelling: Rukiah; 31 December 1917 – 2 September 1945), often credited as Miss Roekiah, was an Indonesian kroncong singer and actress.

Roekiah was born in Bandoeng (now known as Bandung), Preanger Regencies Residency (now in West Java), Dutch East Indies, in 1917 to Mohammad Ali and Ningsih, actors with the Opera Poesi Indra Bangsawan troupe; Ali was originally from Belitung who traveled with Royal Comedy troupe in 1913, while Ningsih was of Sundanese descent and came from Cianjur.

Though Roekiah learned acting mainly from her parents, she also studied the craft with other members of their troupe.

The trio were constantly travelling, leaving Roekiah with no time for a formal education.

By the mid-1920s they were with another troupe, the Opera Rochani.

Roekiah insisted on becoming an actress, despite the opposition of her family, and asked her mother for permission to perform on stage.

Ningsih agreed, with one condition: Roekiah could only perform once.

When the seven-year-old Roekiah took to the stage for the first time, Mohammad Ali – unaware of the agreement between his wife and daughter – rushed on stage and insisted that Roekiah stop singing.

Afterwards, she refused to eat until her parents ultimately relented.

Roekiah performed regularly afterwards with the troupe.

The daughter of two stage performers, she began her career at the age of seven; by 1932 she had become well known in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), as a singer and stage actress.

By 1932, the year she joined Palestina Opera in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), Roekiah had become a well-known stage actress and singer of kroncong music (traditional music with Portuguese influences).

She was admired not only for her voice, but her beauty.

While with Palestina she met Kartolo, an actor, pianist, and songwriter with the troupe; they married later that year.

The new couple soon left Palestina, taking month's hiatus before joining the group Faroka on a tour in Singapore.

Around this time she met Kartolo, whom she married in 1934.

They returned to the Indies in 1936 and left Faroka after Roekiah gave birth to their second child.

The two acted in the 1937 hit film Terang Boelan, in which Roekiah and Rd Mochtar played young lovers.

In 1937, Roekiah made her first film appearance as the leading lady in Albert Balink's Terang Boelan (Full Moon).

She and her co-star Rd Mochtar played two lovers who elope so that Roekiah's character need not marry an opium smuggler; Kartolo also had a small role.

The film was a commercial success, earning over 200,000 Straits dollars during its international release; the Indonesian film historian Misbach Yusa Biran credited Roekiah as the "dynamite" which led to this positive reception.

Despite the success of Terang Boelan, its production company Algemeen Nederlandsch Indisch Filmsyndicaat stopped all work on fiction films.

Now jobless and depressed after the death of her mother, according to journalist W. Imong, Roekiah "kept silent, constantly musing as if she were mentally disturbed".

In order to distract his wife, Kartolo gathered the other cast members from Terang Boelan and established the Terang Boelan Troupe, which toured to Singapore to popular acclaim; this snapped Roekiah out of her melancholy.

After the troupe returned to the Indies, most of the cast switched to Tan's Film, including Roekiah and Kartolo; the two also performed with the Lief Java kroncong group.

After the film's commercial success, Roekiah, Kartolo, and most of the cast and crew of Terang Boelan were signed to Tan's Film, first appearing for the company in their 1938 production Fatima.

With Tan's, the Terang Boelan cast appeared in the 1938 hit Fatima, starring Roekiah and Rd Mochtar.

The film, in which Roekiah played the title role – a young woman who must fend away the advances of a gang leader while falling in love with a fisherman (Rd Mochtar) – closely followed the formula established by Terang Boelan.

Roekiah's acting received wide praise.

One reviewer in the Batavia-based Het Nieuws van den dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië wrote that Roekiah's "sober personification of injustice in the Malay adat wedding captivates even the European spectator", while another, in the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, found that Roekiah's performance was appreciated by everyone.

Fatima was a massive commercial hit, earning 200,000 gulden on a 7,000 gulden budget.

Following the film's success, Tan's continued to cast Roekiah with Rd Mochtar.

They became the colony's first on-screen celebrity couple and were termed the Indies' Charles Farrell–Janet Gaynor.

The popularity of Roekiah–Rd Mochtar as a screen couple led other studios to follow with their own romantic pairings.

They acted together in two more films before Mochtar left the company in 1940; through these films, Roekiah and Mochtar became the colony's first on-screen couple.

Mochtar's replacement, Rd Djoemala, acted with Roekiah in four films, although these were less successful.

After the Japanese invaded the Indies in 1942, Roekiah took only one more film role before her death; most of her time was used entertaining Japanese forces.

During her life Roekiah was a fashion and beauty icon, featuring in advertisements and drawing comparisons to Dorothy Lamour and Janet Gaynor.

Though most of the films in which she appeared are now lost, she has continued to be cited as a film pioneer, and a 1969 article stated that "in her time [Roekiah] reached a level of popularity which, one could say, has not been seen since".

Of her five children with Kartolo, one – Rachmat Kartolo – entered acting.