Tracey Roberts(1914-2002)

With the goal of writing and acting, she studied at the University of Michigan and Cornell University, and then moved to New York to study and perform with the greats of the Actors Studio - Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan. At the same time, she also married Jerry Adelman, worked as a model for illustrators and began searching for a stage name. She settled on Tracy--sometimes credited as Tracey--Roberts in homage to two actors she admired, Spencer Tracy and Robert Montgomery. The blue-eyed, raven-haired Roberts landed a role in Odets' "Paradise Lost" and performed in several well-known plays, including "The Women," "Hedda Gabler," "The Seagull" and the Broadway and Los Angeles premieres of "Orpheus Descending." In Los Angeles, she also performed in such plays as "Winter Kill" with Robert Alda. Motion pictures followed, and she appeared in several from Westerns to comedies during the 1950s, including an uncredited role as the "redhead" in Dean Martin's 1956 Un vrai cinglé de cinéma (1956) and her personal favorite, the 1952 _Actors and Sin (1952)_ with Eddie Albert. But brains, beauty and talent were never enough to make her a star. She quickly established herself as a respected acting coach and director and producer of plays featuring her students. In 1986, after a quarter-century or so in the profession, she told The Los Angeles Times she had indeed gone into teaching "kicking and screaming" but had since "fallen in love" with the job. Roberts taught camera classes, audition and production workshops, speech, movement, musical comedy and script analysis classes, but all with the same focus, she said. Known for her independence and intelligence, Roberts was perhaps best described by her friend Anais Nin who dedicated one of her books: "For T--Who is all the women I ever wrote about and not according to men's patterns."