Ruth Barrie has only been acting for about 15 years, but it’s been on her mind her whole life.
The 77-year-old Mineola resident danced in musicals as a girl in England, but spent most of her adult life raising her two sons as a working single mother.
The desire to perform, though, never left her.
“I wasn’t able to do it, but I was in it. It was my life,” Barrie said. “It was just embedded in me. I must have been born that way.”
Barrie first came to the U.S. from England in 1960, when she was 21. She did some training at HB Studio in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and met a man whom she later married.
They had two children, but her husband died when they were young, leaving her to raise her children by herself.
She ended up attending the College of New Rochelle and later went to New York University, where she got a master’s degree in sports medicine and adult fitness in 1984.
“I’ve been just running my body around ever since,” she said.
Barrie ran fitness programs at a Brooklyn YWHA for about a year, then spent five years as a New York City social worker.
She changed course around 1992, when she opened a ballroom dance studio and took the chance to live her dream as an actor.
For about 10 years, she traveled between New York City and Los Angeles, taking acting classes and taking roles before settling permanently in New York in 2011.
Despite not having as many connections as a younger actor might, Barrie said starting her career late in life was helpful given her decades of life experience in the real world.
“When I went onto the set for the first time, I had to learn about it, but I understood it, and I understood what was going on,” she said. “But when you’re a newbie and you’re a kid, you don’t know how to behave on the set.”
Barrie has appeared in several videos for the College Humor videos and had small parts in films and TV shows, including “Nip/Tuck” and “The Leftovers.”
No matter what the role, Barrie said, she becomes totally immersed in the scene.
“If there’s an audience there, I don’t know it. If there’s a director and cameraman there, I don’t know it,” she said. “It becomes a completely separate world for me, and I am that person saying that person’s words.”
Now, she hopes add a Super Bowl commercial to her resume with her entry to Doritos’ 10th and final “Crash the Super Bowl” contest.
The competition solicits original 30-second commercials for the flavored corn chips from filmmakers around the country. The winning ad, selected from among more than 1,000 submissions, airs during the Super Bowl in February and gets a $1 million prize.
Barrie wrote and produced her entry, in which she plays an unlikely criminal who seductively uses Doritos to escape police interrogators.
She got Trevor Williams, a filmmaker who works with New York City’s Upright Citizens Brigade comedy group, to direct the video, which has gotten close to 900 views on YouTube since it went online Nov. 4.
Voting for the 50 semifinalists Doritos chooses will start in January. If Barrie’s commercial is one of the top three vote winners, she and her crew will get to join the other finalists at the Super Bowl - a party she wants to attend even if she doesn’t win.
“You don’t know who you’re going to meet there,” she said.
