Tracy Reed (English actress)
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Tracy Reed (born 21 September 1942, London) is an English actress.
She was born Clare Tracy Compton Pelissier, the daughter of the director Anthony Pelissier and the actress Penelope Dudley Ward. During a film-acting career that lasted from the early 1960s until 1975, she appeared in about thirty movies. She is probably best known for her role as the mistress of General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove (1964). She has the only female part in that film but is seen in only one scene--when she answers the phone while Turgidson is in the bathroom. Ironically, her character's best moment occurs later in another telephone scene, in which Reed is neither seen nor heard. While General Turgidson is seated at a conference with the president and other military and government leaders in the War Room, his mistress telephones him, and he nervously converses with her, trying not to be noticed by the president. Scott's performance in that scene is a comic gem that is enhanced by what the audience imagines the airheaded mistress is saying to him.
Tracy Pelissier took the surname of her stepfather, Sir Carol Reed, following her mother's remarriage in 1948.
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[edit] Family links
She is the granddaughter of the actress Fay Compton & the producer H.G.Pelissier, and the socialite Freda Dudley Ward & William Dudley Ward. Her great-uncle was the novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie. Her step cousin was the actor Oliver Reed.
Her daughter Lucy Fox (from her first marriage) married the Viscount Gormanston, who is the premier Viscount of Ireland.
[edit] Marriages
She has been married four times:
- 1) The actor Edward Fox (married 1958 - divorced 1961) - one daughter Lucy, Viscountess Gormanston
- 2) The late actor Bill Simpson (Dr. Finlay's Casebook) - two daughters.
- 3) Married to Christopher McCabe - No children
- 4) The actor Neil Hallett (widowed in 2005)
[edit] Selected filmography
- The Way Ahead (1944) (as a baby)
- Our Man in the Caribbean (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) the only woman in the cast
- A Shot in the Dark (1964)
- Devils of Darkness (1965)
- You Must Be Joking! (1965)
- Casino Royale (1967)
- Maroc 7 (1967)
- Hammerhead (1968)
- Random Quest (1969) (TV)
- Percy (1971)
- Melody (1971)
- 1000 Convicts and a Woman (1971)
