Tracy Roberts, 87; Acting Coach Led Playhouse

Tracy Roberts, who acted in her youth but became better known as an acting coach and artistic director of the Tracy Roberts Actors Studio, where she produced and directed such plays as Ray Bradbury’s “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” has died. She was 87.

Roberts died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said her sister, television writer and producer Ann Marcus. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

In addition to the Bradbury play, Roberts in recent years earned a Drama-Logue Award for her production of “Shadowlands.”

Most recently, her sister said, Roberts directed “An Evening With Clifford Odets” for an American Playwrights series, with a commentary written and narrated by their brother, television and film writer Raymond Goldstone.

A decade ago, the two sisters collaborated on a play, “The Art of Dining,” which Roberts directed with Marcus as executive producer at the Tracy Roberts Theatre in West Hollywood. Marcus, financially successful as head writer for 14 years on “Knots Landing,” among other credits, had given Roberts a check for the production as a birthday present.

The careers as well as the lives of the sisters were long intertwined. Roberts produced the first play Marcus wrote, “A Woman’s Place,” at the Desilu Playhouse in 1960. Marcus got Roberts her first television directing job.

Born Blanche Goldstone in Little Falls, N.Y., which she liked to describe as “pure Babbitt country,” Roberts was the oldest of the three showbiz siblings.

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 “Hollywood or Bust” and her personal favorite, the 1952 “Actors and Sin” with Eddie Albert.

But brains, beauty and talent were never enough to make her a star.

“As you get older, you can’t get the parts. I hated all the B.S. involved,” she told The Times in 1993. “So when someone suggested I start teaching acting, it first seemed like a comedown. But ... I was inspired by other actors who had taken up teaching, like Bruce Dern and Lee Grant [and by] ... my spiritual guide, my beloved acting inspiration and teacher Michael Chekhov.”

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 Times she had indeed gone into teaching “kicking and screaming” but had since “fallen in love” with the job.

“Everything has to be there at once,” she explained. “The painter has paint, the sculptor clay, the musician an instrument. Actors have only themselves: their imaginations, memories and attitudes--which can be used in our craft.”

Roberts taught camera classes, audition and production workshops, speech, movement, musical comedy and script analysis classes, but all with the same focus, she said.

“We learn how to push buttons, tap into that creative energy, so that those sources of behavior are there on demand. Then it’s the choice of those tools that gives an actor his individuality, his own special talent.”

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.”

Roberts is survived by her sister and brother. A memorial service is being planned.