Daniela Ruah

Portuguese-American actress born in Boston to Jewish parents from Portugal and raised in Lisbon. A star in Portugal before she played Special Agent Kensi Blye on NCIS: Los Angeles for fourteen seasons, she has also directed episodes of the series.

Who is Daniela Ruah?

Daniela Ruah is a Portuguese-American actress and director, best known as Special Agent Kensi Blye in NCIS: Los Angeles. Born to Portuguese Jewish parents, she is one of the best-known members of Portugal’s small Jewish community, the heirs of a Sephardic presence that the Inquisition tried and failed to erase.

Boston and Lisbon

Daniela Sofia Korn Ruah was born on 2 December 1983 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Jewish parents from Portugal; her mother is an otologist. When she was five the family returned to Portugal, and she grew up in Lisbon, where she began acting as a teenager. She became well known in Portugal through television series, then studied acting in London and New York, including at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

NCIS: Los Angeles

In 2009 she was cast as Special Agent Kensi Blye in NCIS: Los Angeles, which ran for fourteen seasons until 2023, making her one of the most recognized Portuguese actresses in the world. She also directed episodes of the series. In 2018 she co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon. She has continued to act, direct and produce since the series ended.

Legacy

Portugal’s Jewish community was destroyed by forced conversion in 1497 and the Inquisition that followed, and Jews returned openly to Portugal only in modern times. Daniela Ruah, a Jewish actress raised in Lisbon who became a star on both sides of the Atlantic, is part of that revival, and a visible symbol of a Portuguese Jewish identity that survived against the odds.