Daniela Ruah: The Life Story Behind Portugal's NCIS Star

Daniela Ruah was born in Boston, grew up in Portugal, trained in London, and became famous in Los Angeles playing an American federal agent. That sentence sounds like a riddle, and it is the whole story in miniature. She is American by birth, Portuguese by upbringing, and an actress whose working life has been spent crossing the lines that other people treat as fixed. She speaks several languages, she has lived in four countries before the age of thirty, and she spent fourteen years playing the same character on American television while keeping a home life that stayed firmly rooted in her Portuguese identity. Most actors spend a career trying to belong in one place. Ruah built a career on belonging in several places at once, and the NCIS role that made her famous is the least surprising part of it, because a woman who has lived in Boston, Carcavelos, and London can play an agent who belongs anywhere.

A Boston Birth, a Portuguese Childhood, and Two Passports

Daniela Sofia Korn Ruah was born on 2 December 1983 in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Her parents were Portuguese Jews who had moved to the United States, and her father, Moisés Ruah, worked as a doctor, while her mother, Katharina, worked as a nurse. The family moved back to Portugal when Daniela was five years old, and she grew up in Carcavelos, a town near Lisbon on the Atlantic coast. She has said that she feels Portuguese despite being born in America, and the distinction matters, because her identity was formed in Portugal, in Portuguese schools, in a Portuguese-speaking home, and in a country whose television and theatre she would later work in.

Carcavelos in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a seaside town within easy reach of Lisbon, and Ruah grew up there with a brother, in a family that valued education and supported her interest in performing. She has spoken about dancing from a young age, and dance was her first discipline, the one that taught her how to use her body on stage before she learned how to use her voice. She also grew up bilingual, speaking Portuguese at home and in school, and English from her American birth and her family’s time in the United States, and she later added Spanish and French, languages that would prove useful in an acting career that crossed borders. A multilingual childhood is a practical advantage for an actor, and Ruah’s is unusually broad: she can work in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and she has done so, which means that her career has never depended on a single market.

The family’s Jewish heritage is part of the story too. Her parents were Portuguese Jews, and Ruah has spoken about that heritage as part of her identity, a thread that connects her to a long history of Portuguese Jewish families who lived between countries. She has not made it the centre of her public image, and that restraint is itself revealing. She presents herself as a Portuguese actress who happens to have been born in Boston, rather than as a person defined by any single label, and the presentation is accurate, because her life has been a series of crossings rather than a single belonging.

Dance, London, and a Degree in Performing Arts

Ruah’s training took her to London, where she studied performing arts at London Metropolitan University, earning a degree that combined dance, acting, and the academic study of performance. London in the early 2000s was a natural choice for a Portuguese actress who wanted to work in English, and the degree gave her a formal grounding to go with the dancing she had done since childhood. She has said that the London years taught her discipline, and that the city itself taught her independence, because living away from home in a large city at twenty forces a young person to make decisions quickly.

She also studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York, a school known for the Method approach to acting, which asks the actor to draw on personal memory and emotion. The combination of a British university degree and an American Method school is unusual, and it gave Ruah two different vocabularies for acting: the British emphasis on text and technique, and the American emphasis on feeling and impulse. She has used both, and the NCIS role that followed would need both, because a long-running television character has to be technically reliable, hitting marks and delivering lines on schedule, and emotionally alive, so that the audience keeps caring after a hundred episodes.

Before Los Angeles, she worked in Portugal. She appeared in the Portuguese telenovela Jardins Proibidos, which translates as Forbidden Gardens, in 2000, when she was sixteen, and she worked in Portuguese television through the early 2000s, including roles in series that were watched by large audiences in Portugal. Telenovelas in Portugal, as in the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world, are a major part of popular culture, and working in them is a serious apprenticeship. The schedules are fast, the episodes are daily, and the actor learns to prepare quickly and to deliver consistently. Ruah learned those lessons, and they served her well in American television, where the pace of a network procedural is not so different from the pace of a telenovela, even if the language is different.

Jardins Proibidos and the Portuguese Television Years

Jardins Proibidos was Ruah’s first significant television work, and it introduced her to Portuguese audiences as a young actress with a natural screen presence. She was sixteen, and the role asked her to hold her own in a cast of experienced Portuguese actors, in a format that Portuguese viewers watched every evening. The experience taught her the practical side of acting: learning lines quickly, hitting marks, and working with a camera crew that shoots several scenes a day. It also taught her something about fame in a small country. Portugal is a country of about ten million people, and a successful telenovela makes its cast recognisable in supermarkets and on the street. Ruah experienced that recognition early, and she has said that it taught her to be gracious with the public, because in a small country the audience is never far away.

She continued to work in Portuguese television in the years that followed, taking roles that built her range and her reputation in Portugal. She appeared in series and in theatre, and she kept dancing, which remained a part of her physical life as an actor. The Portuguese years are often skipped over in accounts of her career that start with NCIS, and the skipping is a mistake, because the Portuguese years are where she learned the trade. An actor who has carried a telenovela role at sixteen has already learned the discipline that American television demands, and Ruah arrived in Los Angeles with that discipline already in place. She was not a beginner who got lucky. She was a working actress with a decade of experience in two countries, and the audition for NCIS: Los Angeles was a test she was prepared to pass.

The move to Los Angeles was itself a decision, and it was not an easy one. Leaving Portugal meant leaving a career that was already working, and starting again in a city where thousands of actors arrive every year with the same hope. Ruah made the move because she wanted to work in English-language film and television, and because her American birth gave her a practical advantage: she could work in the United States without the visa problems that face many foreign actors. That advantage is real, and it is worth naming, because careers are shaped by practical facts as well as by talent. She had the talent, and she had the passport, and she had the training, and the combination put her in a position to take the chance.

Kensi Blye: Fourteen Seasons in Los Angeles

In 2009, Ruah was cast as Kensi Blye in NCIS: Los Angeles, the CBS police procedural that follows a team of special agents working for the Office of Special Projects in Los Angeles. Kensi is a special agent, a former Marine brat whose father died when she was young, and Ruah played her for fourteen seasons, from 2009 until the series ended in 2023, appearing in more than 320 episodes. The number matters, because very few actors play the same character for fourteen years, and fewer still do it in a show that runs for more than three hundred episodes. A role that long becomes a second life, and Ruah has spoken about how Kensi grew with her, from a young agent in her twenties to a married woman and a mother on screen, mirroring the changes in Ruah’s own life.

Kensi’s story on the show is one of the longest character arcs in American procedural television. She began as a tough, guarded agent who trusted few people, and over the seasons she opened up, fell in love with her partner Marty Deeks, played by Eric Christian Olsen, married him, and faced the question of whether to have children. The relationship with Deeks, known to fans as Densi, became one of the show’s central threads, and Ruah played it with a warmth that balanced Kensi’s toughness. The chemistry with Olsen was real, and it was helped by the fact that Ruah’s husband in real life, David Olsen, is Eric Christian Olsen’s brother, a connection that made the on-screen partnership feel like a family affair. Ruah married David Olsen in 2014, and they have two children together, a son and a daughter.

The work itself was physically demanding. Kensi is an action character, and Ruah did much of her own stunt work, including fight scenes, chases, and scenes that required her to be in peak physical condition. She has spoken about training for the role, and about the injuries and exhaustion that come with a long-running action series. The show filmed in Los Angeles, and the schedule was relentless: long days, night shoots, and the pressure to deliver an episode every week. Ruah sustained it for fourteen years, which is a testament to her professionalism as much as to her talent. She also directed episodes of the series, a step that many long-running television actors take when they want to learn the other side of the camera, and her directing work showed that she understood the show from the inside, not just as a performer but as a storyteller.

Eurovision, Directing, and Life After the Long Run

In 2018, Ruah co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon, alongside Sílvia Alberto, Filomena Cautela, and Catarina Furtado. Eurovision is one of the largest television events in the world, watched by hundreds of millions of people, and hosting it in Lisbon was a moment of national pride for Portugal, which had won the contest the previous year with Salvador Sobral’s song “Amar pelos dois”. Ruah’s role as a host was a homecoming, a Portuguese actress who had become famous in America returning to present the biggest show in Europe to a global audience. She hosted in English and Portuguese, switching between the languages with the ease of someone who has lived in both, and the performance was praised in Portugal as a sign of how far she had come.

The Eurovision hosting also showed a different side of her: the presenter, the person who can hold a live audience and keep a show moving when anything can go wrong. Live television is unforgiving, and Ruah handled it with the same calm she brought to NCIS. She has since directed more, including work on NCIS: Los Angeles itself, where she directed episodes in the later seasons, and she has spoken about wanting to direct more in the future. Directing is a natural next step for an actor who has spent fourteen years inside a television machine, because she knows how the machine works, and she knows what a director needs from an actor, because she has been that actor.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband David Olsen and their two children, and she has spoken about the balance between work and family, and about raising children who are growing up between Portuguese and American culture, as she did. The family connection to the Olsen brothers, through her husband David and her on-screen partner Eric, is a detail that fans love, because it makes the fictional family of NCIS feel like a real one. Ruah has kept her private life largely private, and the privacy is deliberate. She shares what she chooses to share, and she keeps the rest for her family, a boundary that has served her well in a profession that rewards oversharing.

The Languages She Carries Into Every Room

Ruah speaks Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French, and the list is not a party trick. It is the practical foundation of her working life. Portuguese is the language she grew up speaking in Carcavelos, the language of her family, her school, and her first television roles. English is the language of her birth in Boston and of her training in London and New York, and it is the language in which she has spent fourteen years playing an American federal agent. Spanish is the language of the wider Iberian world, and French is the language she added along the way, and together the four languages mean that she can walk into an audition in Los Angeles, in Lisbon, in Madrid, or in Paris, and be understood. That is a rare freedom, and it is one that she built deliberately, through study and through living in the countries where the languages are spoken.

The languages also shaped the way she was cast. Kensi Blye is an American, and Ruah plays her with an American accent that audiences have never questioned, a fact that is easy to overlook and hard to achieve. An accent is not just a sound. It is a rhythm, a set of habits, and a way of thinking, and Ruah’s American accent is the product of a childhood spent between Boston and Portugal, of a degree in London, and of years of listening. She has said that she thinks in different languages at different times, and that the language she is thinking in changes the way she approaches a scene. That is a claim that only a multilingual actor can make, and it is the reason her performances feel natural in English even though English was not the language of her childhood home.

Her Portuguese Jewish heritage is part of the same picture. Her parents were Portuguese Jews, and Ruah has spoken about that heritage as a thread in her identity, a connection to a history of families who lived between countries and who carried their culture with them. She has not made it the centre of her public image, and the restraint is itself a choice, a decision to be known for her work rather than for a label. The languages, the heritage, and the countries she has lived in add up to a single fact: Daniela Ruah belongs in several places at once, and the belonging is not a compromise. It is the career.

The Director’s Chair: What Fourteen Years Inside a Show Teaches

In the later seasons of NCIS: Los Angeles, Ruah stepped behind the camera and directed episodes of the series, a move that many long-running television actors make when they want to understand the other side of the work. Directing an episode of a procedural is a different job from acting in one. The director has to plan the shots, to work with the crew, to manage the schedule, and to shape the performances of the whole cast, and Ruah brought to it the same preparation she had brought to acting: a decade of watching directors work, from Portuguese telenovela sets to American network television, and a knowledge of the show that came from having played Kensi for more than a decade. She knew how the show was built, how a scene was blocked, how a performance was shaped in the edit, and how a crew worked together, and the directing gave her a new way to tell stories.

The experience also changed the way she acted. An actor who has directed understands what a director needs, and Ruah has spoken about the way directing made her a better performer, because she learned to see a scene from the outside, to understand what the camera sees, and to give the director the choices that make an edit work. That is a practical skill, and it is one that few actors develop, because it requires stepping out of the character and thinking about the whole. Ruah did it, and the episodes she directed were praised by the cast and crew, who knew her as a colleague rather than as a visitor. She has said that she wants to direct more in the future, and the ambition is a natural one, because she has spent her whole working life learning how television is made, and the learning is now ready to be used.

Directing also gave her a new kind of authority on set, a voice that was not just the voice of Kensi but the voice of a person who understood the machine. The crew of a long-running show is a family, and Ruah had been part of that family for fourteen years, and the directing was a way of taking responsibility for the family, of shaping the stories that the family told. That responsibility is the reason the directing matters, and it is the reason her future is likely to include more of it, whether in television, in film, or in the Portuguese projects she has spoken about wanting to make.

Los Angeles, Family, and the Balance of Two Cultures

Ruah lives in Los Angeles with her husband David Olsen and their two children, a son and a daughter, and the family life is a deliberate balance between two cultures, Portuguese and American, a balance that mirrors her own childhood. Her children are growing up in a house where Portuguese is spoken, where Portuguese food is cooked, and where the family’s history is told in two languages, and Ruah has spoken about the importance of raising children who understand both sides of who they are. That is not a small thing in Los Angeles, a city where many immigrant families lose their language within a generation, and Ruah has worked to make sure that does not happen in hers.

The balance extends to her work. She has kept her Portuguese identity intact while working in American television, returning to Portugal for projects, hosting Eurovision in Lisbon, and speaking Portuguese in interviews, and the returning is the point: she did not leave Portugal behind when she moved to Los Angeles. She carried it with her, and the carrying made her work better, because it gave her a place to stand. Los Angeles is a city of transplants, of people who have come from everywhere to work in film and television, and Ruah is one of them, but she is a transplant who never forgot where she was planted, and the remembering is visible in everything she does, from the languages she speaks to the projects she chooses to the children she is raising.

My Take:

What I find most interesting about Daniela Ruah is not the fourteen seasons, although fourteen seasons is an extraordinary achievement. It is the fact that she was ready for them. She was not a young actress who stumbled into a long-running show and learned on the job. She was a working actress with a degree, with Method training in New York, with telenovela experience in Portugal, and with dance training from childhood, and she arrived in Los Angeles with all of that already in place. The audition for Kensi Blye was not a lottery ticket. It was a test, and she passed it because she had spent a decade preparing for it. That is the part of her story that young actors should pay attention to, because it is the part that can be copied. You cannot copy luck, but you can copy preparation, and Ruah’s preparation was thorough.

The multilingual life is the second thing that stands out. She was born in Boston, raised in Carcavelos, trained in London and New York, and became famous in Los Angeles. That is four cities and three languages before the age of thirty, and it gave her a flexibility that most actors never develop. A monolingual actor is dependent on one market. A multilingual actor can work in several, and Ruah has worked in Portuguese television, in English-language American television, and as a host in both languages at Eurovision. That flexibility is a form of security, and it is the reason her career did not depend on NCIS alone. When the show ended in 2023, she had already hosted Eurovision, already directed, and already built a life that was not defined by a single role. That is a career built to last, and it was built by choices made years before the fame arrived.

I also think the Kensi role deserves to be taken seriously as acting, not just as a long job. Playing the same character for fourteen years is a particular challenge, because the character has to change without becoming a different person. Kensi in season one is guarded, angry, and alone. Kensi in season fourteen is married, settled, and thinking about children. Ruah played that change gradually, season by season, and the gradual change is what made it believable. A lesser actor would have played Kensi the same way in every season, and the audience would have stopped caring. Ruah let the character grow, and the growth mirrored her own life, which made it feel honest. The relationship with Deeks, played by Eric Christian Olsen, is the heart of that growth, and the fact that her real-life husband is Olsen’s brother adds a layer of warmth that the audience can feel even if they do not know the connection. The show became a family, and the family feeling was real.

The Eurovision hosting is the moment I would point to as the proof of her range. Hosting a live show for hundreds of millions of people is a different skill from acting, and it requires a person who can think on their feet, recover from mistakes, and keep an audience engaged when the script runs out. Ruah did it in two languages, in her home country, on the biggest stage in European television, and she did it well. That is not a side job. It is a demonstration that her talents are wider than a single role, and that she could have had a career as a presenter if she had wanted one. She chose acting, but the hosting shows that the choice was a choice, not a limitation.

Her directing work is the natural next step, and I think it is the most interesting part of her future. An actor who has spent fourteen years on a procedural knows how a television episode is built, how a scene is blocked, how a performance is shaped in the edit, and how a crew works together. That knowledge is rare, and it is the reason that so many long-running television actors become directors. Ruah directed episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles in its later seasons, and the experience gave her a new way to tell stories. I would expect her to direct more, and I would expect her to direct well, because she has spent her whole working life watching directors work, from Portuguese telenovela sets to American network television. She has been a student of directing for twenty years without calling herself one.

If I had to recommend a starting point, I would start with the early seasons of NCIS: Los Angeles, because they show Kensi at her toughest, a young agent who trusts no one and fights everyone, and the performance is physical, funny, and sharp. Then I would watch the later seasons, because they show the character softening without weakening, and the change is subtle and moving. Then I would watch the Eurovision final from Lisbon in 2018, because it shows Ruah as herself, not as a character, switching between Portuguese and English and holding a live audience of hundreds of millions. Those three viewings, spread across a decade, are the arc: a fighter, a wife, and a host. The fighter is the most exciting. The wife is the most human. The host is the most surprising. The woman who can do all three is a woman who has built a career on being ready.

I also want to say something about the decision to leave Portugal for Los Angeles, because it is a decision that many actors face and few talk about honestly. Leaving a career that is working, in a country where you are known, to start again in a city where you are nobody, is a frightening choice. Ruah made it, and the choice worked, but it worked because she had a plan. She had the passport, she had the training, she had the languages, and she had the experience. She did not go to Los Angeles hoping to be discovered. She went to Los Angeles to work, and the work came because she was prepared. That is the lesson, and it is a practical one: preparation is the part of a career that you control, and Ruah controlled it.

The last thing I would note is the quietness of her fame. She is famous, but she is not loud about it. She does not court controversy, she does not overshare, and she has kept her family life private. That quietness is a choice, and it is a choice that has served her well, because it means that the public knows her as Kensi, as a host, and as a director, rather than as a personality. In a profession that rewards noise, quietness is a form of strength, and Ruah has it. The career is still going, and the next chapter, whether it is directing, presenting, or a new acting role, will be worth watching, because it will be chosen, not stumbled into.

The fourteen-year run is the part of her story that I think is hardest to appreciate, because fourteen years is a long time to play one person, and the difficulty is not in the acting. It is in the staying. A television series that runs for fourteen seasons asks its actors to show up, year after year, to learn lines, to hit marks, to be in peak physical condition, and to care about a character that the audience has already decided they know. Ruah did that, and she did it without the performance going stale, which is a rare achievement. The audience kept caring about Kensi because Ruah kept caring about her, and the caring is visible in the later seasons, in the way Kensi softens without weakening, in the way she becomes a wife and thinks about becoming a mother, and in the way the character’s growth mirrors Ruah’s own life. That mirroring is not a coincidence. It is the result of an actress who let her own experience inform the character, and who trusted the audience to notice.

I also think the representation question deserves to be taken seriously, because Ruah is a Portuguese actress who became famous in America, and that is a path that few Portuguese actors have taken. Portugal is a small country, and its actors rarely break into American television, and Ruah did it not by abandoning Portugal but by carrying it with her. She hosted Eurovision in Lisbon, she speaks Portuguese in interviews, she returns to Portugal for projects, and she has kept her identity intact while working in Los Angeles. That is a model for actors from small countries, and it is a model that is worth naming: you do not have to choose between home and the world. You can carry home with you, and the carrying makes the work better, because it gives you a place to stand.

The work-life balance is the third thing I would point to, because it is easy to overlook and hard to achieve. Ruah has two children, she has a husband, she has a home in Los Angeles, and she spent fourteen years working on a show that demanded long days and night shoots, and she sustained all of it without the public breakdowns and without the scandals that often accompany a long career in Hollywood. That is not luck. It is discipline, and the discipline is the same one she learned in dance as a child, in London as a student, and in Portuguese television as a teenager: show up, do the work, go home, and do it again tomorrow. The discipline is not glamorous, and it does not make headlines, but it is the reason a career lasts fourteen years, and it is the reason her children will grow up with a mother who was present as well as famous.

If I had to add one more recommendation, it would be to watch the Eurovision final from Lisbon in 2018, not as a fan of the contest but as a student of Ruah, because it shows her as herself, not as a character, switching between Portuguese and English, holding a live audience of hundreds of millions, and doing it with a calm that is the product of fourteen years of live television. The hosting is the proof that her talents are wider than a single role, and that she could have had a career as a presenter if she had wanted one. She chose acting, but the hosting shows that the choice was a choice, not a limitation, and the choosing is the point. A career built on choices is a career that lasts, and Ruah’s has lasted, and it is still going, and the next chapter, whether it is directing, presenting, or a new acting role, will be worth watching, because it will be chosen, not stumbled into, and the choosing is what makes it interesting.

The directing is the part of her future that I find most promising, because an actor who has spent fourteen years inside a television machine knows how the machine works, and the knowing is a form of power. Ruah directed episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles in its later seasons, and the experience gave her a new way to tell stories, a way that does not depend on being in front of the camera. She has spoken about wanting to direct more, and the ambition is a natural one, because she has been a student of directing for twenty years without calling herself one. The directors she watched, in Portuguese telenovelas and in American network television, taught her the craft, and the craft is now hers to use. I would expect her to direct a feature film, or a Portuguese television series, and I would expect her to direct it well, because she understands actors, she understands a set, and she understands a story.

The last thing I would note is the quietness of her fame, because it is a choice, and the choice has served her well. She is famous, but she is not loud about it. She does not court controversy, she does not overshare, and she has kept her family life private. That quietness is a form of strength, and it is the reason her career feels coherent: the work is the public part, and the family is the private part, and the two are kept separate. In a profession that rewards noise, quietness is a discipline, and Ruah has it. The career is still going, and the next chapter will be worth watching, because it will be chosen, and the choosing is what makes it interesting.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles did Daniela Ruah appear in as Kensi Blye?

Ruah played Kensi Blye from 2009 until the series ended in 2023, appearing in more than 320 episodes across fourteen seasons, one of the longest continuous runs for a single character in American procedural television.

Where was Daniela Ruah born, and why does she say she feels Portuguese?

Ruah was born on 2 December 1983 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Portuguese parents, and the family moved back to Portugal when she was five, so she grew up in Carcavelos near Lisbon, in Portuguese schools and a Portuguese-speaking home, which is why she describes herself as Portuguese despite her American birthplace.

Did Daniela Ruah really host the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon?

Yes, Ruah co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon in 2018, alongside Sílvia Alberto, Filomena Cautela, and Catarina Furtado, presenting in both English and Portuguese on a night when Portugal was hosting after Salvador Sobral’s win the previous year.

Ruah is married to David Olsen, who is the brother of Eric Christian Olsen, the actor who played Marty Deeks, Kensi’s on-screen partner, so her real-life brother-in-law played her character’s husband on the show.

What did Daniela Ruah study in London before moving to Los Angeles?

Ruah studied performing arts at London Metropolitan University, earning a degree that combined dance, acting, and the academic study of performance, and she also studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York.

How did Daniela Ruah’s Portuguese telenovela work prepare her for NCIS: Los Angeles?

Ruah began in the Portuguese telenovela Jardins Proibidos in 2000 at sixteen, where daily episodes, fast schedules, and the need to learn lines quickly taught her the discipline and consistency that American network procedural television demands.