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Stardom, singledom and my mother Diana Ross: Tracee Ellis Ross bares all

 ( Djeneba Aduayom)
( Djeneba Aduayom)

Tracee Ellis Ross remembers the exact moment when her dream of being an actress died a thousand deaths.

She was in her 20s and had been auditioning and auditioning, filling up a bulging ring-binder with all the roles she hadn’t got. She had tried acting classes in her native New York, tried to develop a dazzling personality, and crucially, she had tried getting an agent — who was now standing in front of her, saying that none of it had worked so she was being dropped.

‘She brought me into her office,’ recalls Ross, ‘and said, “You come with all these things. You’re pretty, you have style, your mom is Diana Ross — and then you get into a room and nothing happens. You just don’t pop.” I’m not joking, I felt like she had taken my heart out of my chest. She was in an office chair with wheels and I felt like I could see my heart underneath it, and she was moving around and it was getting more and more caught in the wheel and there was just blood everywhere. I couldn’t get out of the room fast enough, without the tears coming out of my…’. She pauses, distracted. ‘Who is that gorgeous creature behind you? He’s so cute!’

‘Deep down I knew that I was a person who popped’ - Tracee Ellis RossDjeneba Aduayom
‘Deep down I knew that I was a person who popped’ - Tracee Ellis RossDjeneba Aduayom

Ah, the joys of interviewing over Zoom and being upstaged by my dog. Ross is at home in Los Angeles, in her blue sitting room with lemon trees outside the window. The way her face sashays delightedly around an anecdote only makes the agent’s diss seem even more ironic. As does the fact that the now 48-year-old went on to win the Golden Globe award in 2017 for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her role in the sociopolitical family comedy Black-ish, the first black woman in 34 years to do so. She also notched up countless other acting and comedy awards and nominations (Emmys, Critics Choice, NAACP, BET) and became a freshly minted style icon in the process, memorably wearing a hot pink duvet dress by Valentino to the 2018 Emmys.

Yet this would never have happened had she not realised there was some truth to the insult. ‘To find out I was not popping was a turning point for me, because I knew deep down that I was a person who popped,’ she says. ‘At that point in my career I don’t think I knew how to unite the person who I was in my soul with the person who I was in the room. I think I was trying to say look at me, not this is me. So when people looked at me, there was no… there was no me there to look at. I think I was terrified and incredibly shy, even though it came out in this big personality. It was a turning point in my career and in my life.’

Diana Ross with daughters Chudney, Tracee and Rhonda in 1976Getty Images
Diana Ross with daughters Chudney, Tracee and Rhonda in 1976Getty Images

As was the TV show Girlfriends, in which she would land the starring role of Joan Clayton, a qualified lawyer and almost matriarchal figure in a tight group of four black female friends. It ran from 2000 to 2008, and various film roles followed, including last year’s The High Note, in which she plays a hugely famous singer, for which she had to perform several songs. Though Ross can sing, she had shied away from it all her life. (‘Finally,’ said Diana, in tears, when her daughter played the recordings to her.) But in 2014 she took on what would become her biggest part: Dr Rainbow Johnson in Black-ish, which deftly manages to look straight at real issues, such as how to tell your kids about police brutality. They are now shooting the eighth season, with the previous ones currently available on Amazon Prime and iTunes.

Though the character is a married mother of five children, while Ross is single and doesn’t have kids, they do share some important details, such as having a white father.

Diana Ross had five children to three different men, and Tracee’s dad is the LA music industry executive Robert Ellis Silberstein, who is Jewish. They all still seem extremely close — he recently posted an Instagram celebration of the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Diana, despite them having been divorced for 44 of them. Tracee is being strict about following the rules during the pandemic, which means she really misses her family.

Rhonda, Diana, Tracee and Berry Gordy (Rhonda’s father) with Diana’s sons Ross Arne Naess and Evan Naess at the Soul Train Music Awards in 1995Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Rhonda, Diana, Tracee and Berry Gordy (Rhonda’s father) with Diana’s sons Ross Arne Naess and Evan Naess at the Soul Train Music Awards in 1995Ron Galella Collection via Getty

‘I feel like I need to lay in my mommy’s lap for a good hour or so, every couple of days, and just let her rub my head,’ she laments. She has said before that ‘Diana Ross has got nothing on my mom’, and tells me that, as a child, even though she would go to the shows and watch her mother sing to hundreds of thousands of adoring fans, ‘It was very clear to me that I was wanted before I got here. To my siblings too — and we’re a very bonded group still. That there was a space made in the world that she sort of cleaned off. Her intention was always for us to live our lives from her shoulders. My mom’s career was never more important than her children.’

The work ethic rubbed off too, for example when Ross was at high school in New York (before going to finishing school in Switzerland and graduating from Brown University). ‘I have always kept a sort of military schedule. Even in my childhood. I would finish this long day at school, then I would run track — like a crazy person! — then get home and we would eat dinner and I would take a shower and then I was too tired to work. So I would wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning to do two hours of homework before getting ready for school.

And my mom was really helpful. She would say everybody has different learning styles and everybody works better at different times of day. I used to say I can’t sit still for two hours, and she would say, “Why don’t you work in 15 minute increments and take a break?”’

‘I want to put on uncomfortable high heels and go to dinner and complain about my seat!’ Djeneba Aduayom
‘I want to put on uncomfortable high heels and go to dinner and complain about my seat!’ Djeneba Aduayom

It’s a system Ross continued as an adult, when she tried to get into yoga but decided she could only handle the ‘freaking nightmare of 90 minutes of silent breathing’ if she placed her mat right beside the door so she could sneak out for breaks. She calls this ‘feasible goals’ and learned to do the same thing with auditioning. ‘I used to get really nervous, so I would give myself the feasible goal of taking one conscious breath in my audition. Just one. Your job is not to go in there and get the part, your job is not to go in there and win them over. Your job is to go in there and take one conscious breath. That’s it.’

A year of lockdowns has taken its toll though. Yes, she’s a homebody who makes her bed to look like a hotel every day, even though she’s an independent woman who sometimes gets up at 5am, but she’s had enough.

‘I want to put on uncomfortable high heels and go to dinner and complain about my seat!’ she screams, comically. ‘And have a wonderful wait person say, “Can I get you anything else?” I would love that. I would long for that. I am wonderful at cleaning but I don’t think it’s the best use of me. I would happily not mop a floor again.’

Tracee  Ellis Ross and Anthony Anderson in Black-ishABC via Getty Images
Tracee Ellis Ross and Anthony Anderson in Black-ishABC via Getty Images

She is allowed out to work on Black-ish, but it has been strange, because the hair and make-up trailer used to be a place of great joy in the morning, ‘with all the kids and me and Anthony [Anderson, who plays her husband Dré] singing and screaming, just like a family’. But now they have to prepare separately and wear face shields in rehearsals, while the props guy has made a cart with lights and music and hand sanitiser for the objects they need on set.

‘Now Anthony and I grab our wedding rings, separately, from the cart and we start dancing before we start shooting. We dance our way onto the stage now. So we have found ways to safely find joy and do what we do.’

Her new beauty company, Pattern, with hair products aimed at black women, has been a long time coming too, and the road was even more fraught than becoming an actor. She knew her products were needed but couldn’t convince marketing experts.

‘The industry was not fertile like it is now. The term “black girl magic” did not exist 11 years ago. Social media did not exist. I was on the show Girlfriends, that was hugely successful in a particular niche, but I had no social media to identify my own following; I didn’t know how to say it was mine, there were no metrics to prove that. The natural hair movement had not occurred, there were no articles in The New York Times saying this was the new thing in beauty.’

She got a new manager who seemed to understand the beauty proposal ‘until she said, “I think you should do a line of wigs.” I was like, “Wait what. No! That’s not it at all!” She said, “Well you’re saying everyone wants your hair.” I said, “No, I didn’t say everyone wants my hair. Not at all. I don’t want anyone to look at me and not love what they have. I want them to look at me and to have juicy and joyful hair too.”’ She adds: ‘If I talk about Pattern, I say we are not a social justice organisation, but we are inherently political as a beauty company because at the core of my brand is the celebration of black beauty — and that is inherently political in a world of white supremacy.’

Tracee, Diana and Rhonda appearing on Americans  All in 1974ABC
Tracee, Diana and Rhonda appearing on Americans All in 1974ABC

We’re speaking the week after the storming of the Capitol, so I ask her how life in America has been since. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You know.’ She goes quiet, really quiet for the first time. ‘I really haven’t processed what I feel about that. It unearthed a lot of grief, I will say. The combination of being almost a year into a pandemic, at the end of four years of… that man.’ She seems almost unable to say his name. ‘How many unprecedented things can a nervous system take in? I truly feel that, just the devastation that has occurred with jobs, and businesses, and the loss of life. People are living with genuine fear, not anxiety. On top of the re-igniting of racial trauma at a public level, for so many people in this country, if you are black or brown.’

She seems almost unable to say his name. ‘How many unprecedented things can a nervous system take in? I truly feel that, just the devastation that has occurred with jobs, and businesses, and the loss of life. People are living with genuine fear, not anxiety. On top of the re-igniting of racial trauma at a public level, for so many people in this country, if you are black or brown.’

On a brighter note, she is nothing but grateful for the way her own life has disproved the doubters. ‘Like, I get interviewed by Oprah. What?! My life has gained some traction! Haha.’

But as much as Ross worships Oprah, she feels she must set something straight which came up in that interview. ‘She said to me, you’ve become the poster child for single women, something like that,’ says Ross. ‘Now even that is a reduction of the experience. I think that that is naming something in the paradigm, as if single and married are these two things we’re choosing between. So I would like to think I’m a poster child for cultivating a life of freedom and joy. That is actually on my terms. That is my choice.’