Beatrice Roberts

Alice Beatrice Roberts was born on March 7, 1905, in New York City, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Colin M. Roberts. She attended Winthrop High School before beginning a career that spanned stage, screen, and competitive pageantry.

Roberts competed in the Miss America pageants of both 1924 and 1925, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, representing her city as Miss Manhattan in 1924 and Miss Greater New York in 1925. On both occasions she received the award for Most Beautiful Girl in Evening Gown. Her stage career brought her to Broadway in 1926, where she appeared in the play Oh, Please.

Her film career began when she traveled to Hollywood in 1933, and over the following sixteen years she appeared in nearly sixty films. From 1938 onward, Roberts worked exclusively at Universal Pictures through a special arrangement involving Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. According to author Charles Higham, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer had first noticed Roberts in a party scene in the film San Francisco and subsequently began a personal relationship with her. Mayer kept her under contract and arranged for her to be loaned out to Universal on a semipermanent basis, where she was typically cast as maids, nurses, or secretaries. Her most prominent screen role came in 1938 when she played Queen Azura in the Universal serial Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars.

Roberts married Robert Ripley, owner of Ripley's Believe It or Not, on October 31, 1919, when she was fourteen years old and he was twenty-nine. The marriage lasted approximately three months but was not officially dissolved until 1926. On May 17, 1928, she married Robert A. Dillon in Tijuana, Mexico; that marriage was annulled on September 8, 1933, after it was determined that Dillon had been married to another woman at the time of the ceremony. In 1940, Roberts married John Wesley Smith.

She died on July 24, 1970, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, from pneumonia, at the age of sixty-five.