There is no doubt that Ružica Sokić was one of the most important Serbian theatre, film and television actresses: she won the Sterija award as Best Actress at the renowned theatre festival in Novi Sad twice, received three lifetime achievement awards, and among the many film awards, her most notable ones are the Golden and Silver Arena in Pula
In the beginning, she was only known to experts of the Belgrade theatre scene: she did appear on television, but the audience at the time was very scant; her first film role remained uncredited (one of the cheerleaders in the second segment of the famous omnibus by Vladimir Pogačić, Saturday Night from 1957). However, connoisseurs immediately recognized an exceptional talent and soon after graduating from the Belgrade Academy of Theatre Arts she signed a contract with the Contemporary Theatre.
However, when Bojan Stupica gathered actors for the newly founded Atelje 212, she became part of the permanent cast in 1962. Later she complained that caused her to miss out on acting the classical repertoire, however, when it came to the modern – both foreign and domestic – she was undisputed. The play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a big hit; she played Honey alongside Slobodan Perović as George and Vladimir Popović as Nick, and gained even more renown in plays by Serbian authors, notably Aleksandar Popović, Brane Crnčević and Gordan Mihić.
She mastered street talk perfectly, thus intriguing Black Wave directors Dušan Makavejev and Živojin Pavlović: the former cast her for a juicy role of Eva Ras’s friend in Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and the latter for a much more important role in his Golden Arena award-winning film When I Am Dead and Gone - she played Dragan Nikolić’s casual companion who talks him into becoming a singer although he has no talent.
Since then she became an important member of the Yugoslav cinema, acting in commercial replicas of the Black Wave films (Traces of a Black Haired Girl), partisan spectacles (Guns of War), as well as in all four sequels of the incredibly popular comedy series Tight Skin, which deals with the adversities of a common man in socialism. She was constantly sought after in television, for both TV dramas and serials, and her last performances were in the recent productions of the Serbian hit maker Zdravko Šotra. It is less well-known that Croatian filmmakers had an important role in her film opus. Antun Vrdoljak gave her her first main role in the comedy Love and Some Swear Words (1969): she played a circus performer in Imotska Krajina in the 1930s who seduces a local policeman, Boris Dvornik; they evidently worked well as a couple, since the film was seen by 100,000 viewers in Zagreb alone. For Belgrade producers Vladimir Tadej directed her most important film, the bitter comedy Žuta, which brought her the Golden Arena in 1973. Gordan Mihić wrote the part especially for her, and she portrayed a prostitute with a heart of gold, similar to Fellini’s Cabiria, who despite all the life’s blows never resigns to defeat. She also performed monologues from Žuta on stage and appeared in all the films Tadej directed in that decade.
She somewhat gullibly accepted a role in Zvonimir Maycug’s debut film I Am Your God in 1982; little did she know that he would cause a scandal in the late eighties with the first Yugoslavian pornographic film Oasis, or that he would edit in soft-core pornographic scenes starring himself between her own scenes. The film, luckily for her, never found a distributor.
She spent most of her theatrical career in Atelje 212, which co-published her book of memoirs “The Passion for Flying” in 2010. Atelje 212 also released the official news of her death. For the last few years she suffered from Alzheimer's disease; she died on December 19, 2013, shortly after her 79th birthday. (Nenad Polimac, Jutarnji list)