Have you ever wondered how much Tracee Ellis Ross has been influenced by her famous mother?
As it turns out, quite a bit. But she's also very much her own woman.
Keep watching to learn some surprising facts about this unique actress and fashion icon.
With a mother who's one of the most iconic singers of the 20th century,
it's no surprise that Tracee Ellis Ross wasn't exactly champing at the bit to land a role that
would require her to showcase her own vocal abilities. But that's precisely what she did
when she signed on to play a singing superstar in the 2020 film The High Note. Singing is something
Ross had tried to avoid for her entire life, and understandably so. In a May 2020 interview
with The Guardian, she recalled being cast in a mandatory school production of The Pirates
of Penzance and begging the headmaster to let her avoid singing. As she confessed,
"I did the play but I just mouthed the words."
Ross ultimately took on The High Note because she loved the script
and so that she could face one of her biggest childhood fears. As she described it,
"Typical me, I didn't do it small — I decided to do
it as the lead in a movie playing a musical diva."
Ultimately, she was happily surprised by the results, as she noted,
"At 47 years old, to go into the studio and start singing,
and discover that I actually had a voice that could work... it was life-changing for me."
"You can sang. You can flat-out sang."
Tracee Ellis Ross has never been married, and she has no
children — and she's totally cool with that! In a 2021 interview with Harper's Bazaar,
she shared that getting married and starting a family was something she'd
always envisioned for herself, but she never managed to make it happen. She also revealed,
"I would still love [a wedding], but what am I going to do,
just sit around, waiting? Shut up. I've got so many things to do."
She described herself in another interview with Harper's Bazaar
as "happily single," while also adding,
"That doesn't mean I am not open to and don't want a relationship. But in my wonderful and
robust experience of being single, I have learned to have a productive relationship with loneliness
and an intensely juicy relationship with my joyful solitude — I really enjoy my company."
Ross' home is a sanctuary where she loves to feel surrounded by items with deep,
personal meanings for her. In a 2021 interview with Financial Times,
she was asked to single out the one item in her home that she can never part with,
but she couldn't bring herself to winnow it down to just one. As she explained,
"Everything in my home has a story. This couch I'm sitting on,
it's from college and it's been reupholstered about 63 times. There's an origami bird mobile
hanging from a chandelier that was made for me by a friend. Everything is a treasure."
One of those treasures that sits in her kitchen is a cake stand that she found in an Italian
antique store and then schlepped across Europe. It's not particularly pretty, and she's never
once in her life baked a cake, but she was nonetheless drawn to this particular stand,
which remains a memorable souvenir from that trip.
Tracee Ellis Ross may have been born in the lap of luxury, but she sure wasn't brought up
that way. Her mother Diana made sure of that. As Tracee explained to The Guardian in 2020,
"I've always been taught that you work for the things you want. My mom always joked:
'I'm not leaving you guys any of this money. I made this money for me! I'll make sure there's
a roof over your head. You can have health insurance and food. But other than that...'
I mean, I had a job in high school [...] There was
a commitment on her part to a normalcy that I have taken into my adult life."
This self-reliance led to Ross working as an intern for the now-defunct fashion magazine
Mirabella. The gig reflected the keen interest in
the field that she's had all her life. As she revealed to W Magazine in 2017,
"I had wanted to model when I was younger and then that kind of translated into me
realizing that I was in love with images and the fashion industry."
Then while Ross was in college, she also discovered a love of acting,
which led her to simultaneously taking acting lessons while interning at the magazine.
Ross is known for her distinctive curly hair, but when she was younger,
she felt out of place because none of her classmates had locks like hers.
As she admitted in a 2021 interview with Byrdie,
"I did all the things I thought I was supposed to do to try and make my hair
cool, make me loveable, make me pretty, make me likeable by guys — the whole thing. So,
when I started the journey of understanding and loving my hair and my curls, it was a process."
Ross had some admittedly "questionable hairstyles" during her teen years,
but she ultimately eventually embraced her hair. As she told Vogue in 2021,
"My journey to loving my hair has been an ongoing adventure,
hard-earned. Some of it has been finding the right products,
trial and error, experimentation and courage. The courage to allow my hair to do what it
naturally does instead of trying to beat it into submission to be something it is not."
"It was dried and fried and tired and over and done."
It was that complex relationship with her hair that led Ross to launch her
own line of hair products, called Pattern. As she explained to Byrdie,
"I've been dreaming of launching a haircare line for so long,
because there is a community of extraordinary people — a big,
bold, stunning community — that has unmet beauty needs that have not been addressed,
not been serviced, not been understood, not been cared for, not been celebrated."
Embarking on an acting career after graduating college, Ross amassed a few small screen roles
before landing her big break in 2000 when she was cast in the sitcom Girlfriends.
Debuting on the now-defunct UPN network before eventually moving to its successor The CW,
Girlfriends was a hit that ran for eight seasons until 2008. That's an enviable length for any TV
show, but the expectations that it engendered in Ross unfortunately proved to be unrealistic.
As she admitted during a 2017 panel at the Paley Center for Media's Paleyfest,
"I thought Girlfriends was going to open up the pearly gates of Hollywood."
Alas, it didn't quite work out that way,
and that fact really hit home when she auditioned for black-ish,
as the sound technician who was recording her had no idea who she was. As she recalled,
"He's like, 'I mean, you are just funny! Where have you been?' and I'm like, 'I was on a show
called Girlfriends, and he goes 'But it wasn't on like network television,' and I was like 'Yeah,
it was,' he goes 'But it wasn't a comedy,' I was like, 'Yeah, it was' and he goes 'Well you weren't
like a lead' and I was like 'Yeah, I was' and, it just went on and on [...] It was very humbling."
In addition to her acting gigs, Ross has also quietly dipped her toe into directing.
She made her directorial debut with a 2008 episode of Girlfriends and followed that up
with two episodes of black-ish. She's revealed that her favorite part of the directing process
actually takes place after filming has completed and she begins editing
together the footage that she's shot. As she explained to Variety in 2019,
"It's like when you buy a great pair of shoes and you buy a great pair of pants
and when you go in the closet, you pull everything out and you make a great outfit and you're like,
'Yeah, that's right.' You get to see the work and you put everything out
and together [...] I find it incredibly exciting."
In another interview with Variety, Ross discussed the inherent difficulties in
pulling off double duty as actor and director, not just because of the additional workload
but also from being forced to examine herself critically. As she explained,
"I think the biggest difficulty for me is having to think about what I look like.
Because as a director, I put my hands all over my face while I'm watching the monitor."
In the spring of 2021, ABC announced plans to renew black-ish for an eighth season. But the
news was bittersweet, as Season 8 would also be the series' last. This gave the cast members an
opportunity to reflect on going into the new season knowing that it would be the final one,
which doesn't always happen in the mercurial world of television. As Ross told Entertainment Tonight,
"I will tell you what the most beautiful thing is [...] I've never had the opportunity to
walk into a final season knowing it's the final season. So, being able to take in
all of the beauty of it and all of the things we've appreciated all of these years
but then really be awake to it — I'm looking forward to that and I know it's going to be hard."
In another interview with Entertainment Tonight, Ross opened up about the
emotions she was experiencing once filming had begun, as she admitted,
"I can tell you I drove off the lot the other day crying,
because I'm already... we're a family. We've been working with this incredible group of people
for eight years now. For me, it's personal. I've been spending 5 A.M. in the morning
until 7 o'clock at night for a [long time] with a group of people I have come to love
and respect and cherish, and it will be hard to not see them everyday."
"I left the lot crying. I was like, I am going to miss those people. We have
been- we've become such a family. Eight years, all the same people."
Fashion has long been a passion for Tracee Ellis Ross, which she attributes to her mom.
As she revealed to the Financial Times in 2021,
"My style icon is my mother — she is the one individual
who has had the greatest impact on my style."
Diana Ross' closet has offered plenty of inspiration to her daughter.
As Tracee explained to Vanity Fair in 2018,
"Before my career got to a certain place, I did a lot of either designing my clothes
or wearing things out of my mother's closet. Although they weren't taken out of my mother's
closet to the red carpet, they were 'stolen' from my mom's closet and living in my closet,
and I had the distinct honor of choosing them for whatever the event was."
For Ross, fashion is more than just looking good. As she told CNN in 2019,
"Fashion started as a way to protect myself — to have a bit of control over
how the world perceives me. And I think, for many, that's still the case. I think
fashion has evolved for me personally into a form of creative expression."
When it comes to deciding what to wear on any given day, Ross told Good Housekeeping in 2017,
"I wear what makes my heart sing.
I can come to work at 5 in the morning in a fabulous outfit because it's what makes me happy."
"Where's the sparkles?! Where's the feathers?! Give 'em to me! Fashion, I love fashion!"
One of Ross' favorite ways to spend her free time is traveling,which is yet another trait
that she's inherited from her mom. Accompanying her mother as she performed all over the world
allowed her to become comfortable with making her own way around the globe.
As she explained to Condé Nast Traveler in 2018,
"It's empowering, and has afforded me the opportunity to connect with other human beings,
to see how we are all so much alike, to learn about different cultures and traditions,
and to really open up my understanding of what it
is to be a human. It has given my life a richness that I really appreciate."
As a single woman, Ross has become adept at the art of traveling solo, something she's
loved since she was a teenager attending boarding school in Switzerland. Flying back and forth from
her home in Los Angeles truly shaped her as a traveler. As she admitted to Brit + Co in 2018,
"I think that was a big growth opportunity for me as I was coming of age and learning
how to be on my own. I'm very comfortable traveling alone and being my own best friend."
"Do you have a favorite place?"
"I have a lot of favorite places."
"I bet."
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