Tracy Reed (English Actress) - Life and Career

Life and Career

Reed was born Clare Tracy Compton Pelissier, the daughter of the director Anthony Pelissier and actress Penelope Dudley-Ward, and took the surname of her stepfather, Sir Carol Reed, following her mother's remarriage in 1948. Reed is the granddaughter of the actress Fay Compton and the producer H.G. Pelissier, and the socialite Freda Dudley Ward and William Dudley Ward. Her great-uncle was the novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie. Actor Oliver Reed was a step-cousin.

During a film-acting career that lasted from the early 1960s until 1975, she appeared in about thirty films, the TV series Man of the World (1962) and was at one point under consideration as a replacement for Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

She may be best-remembered for her role as Miss Scott, the mistress of General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in director Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove (1964). She has the only female part in that film and is (principally) seen in only one scene-when she answers the phone while Turgidson is in the bathroom. She is also shown as the centrefold "Miss Foreign Affairs" in the June 1962 copy of Playboy magazine being read by pilot Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) in the B-52.

In the photo, she is lying down, apparently nude, with the January 1963 issue of Foreign Affairs – Vol. 41, No. 2, containing Henry Kissinger's suggestive article "Strains on the Alliance" – strategically draped across her buttocks. When asked in 1994 if she had "fond memories" of working on the film, she replied "'Oh yes, lots!'", but "I was wearing a bikini the whole time,' Reed, and when Kubrick decided to open the set to the press, 'there were all these reporters staring at me. It was dreadful.'"

Later in life, she worked as a gourmet foods company representative in Ireland, traveling the country to persuade shops to sell her employers products.

She died of cancer in County Cork, Ireland at age 69 on 2 May 2012, and her funeral was held there as well.