Lynne Roberts

Biography

Attractive, blue-eyed, Texas-born "B" actress Lynne Roberts was born Theda Mae Roberts on November 22, 1922, to a stage mother whose favorite star was silent screen vamp Theda Bara. The younger of two children (her older brother John was born in 1920), she was dancing by age 4, and singing and acting at a professional school. Within a few years she was appearing in a song-and-dance act with her older brother in vaudeville. The nascent actress changed her stage name to Lynn Roberts (without the "e" in the first name) in her teens as she began to hit the studios for film work. Signed up as a teenager, she appeared in a few inconsequential bits. The athletically inclined young lady was eventually promoted to Roy Rogers' love interest in a series of sagebrush sagas. With Come on, Rangers! (1938), Shine on Harvest Moon (1938) and Rough Riders' Round-up (1939), she was now being billed as Mary Hart. She left Republic after a money dispute and began to freelance. Disliking the name Mary Hart, she changed it one last time to Lynne Roberts (with the added "e") and earned a new contract from 20th Century-Fox. Most of her roles were in westerns and mystery programmers, pictures such as The Bride Wore Crutches (1940) and Street of Memories (1940) that were generally overlooked by the critics. She soon found herself again reduced to bit roles (the fact that she angered the studio by eloping in 1941 didn't help matters). With her career going nowhere, she returned to Republic Pictures and churned out more assembly-line movies such as Port of 40 Thieves (1944) and My Buddy (1944) for the duration. Lynne turned to TV in the 1950s and appeared in a number of dramatic plays. She replaced Patricia Morison in the detective series The Cases of Eddie Drake (1952) in 1952. Two feature films were cobbled together from several of these episodes and shown in England: "Pattern for Murder" (1953) and "Murder Ad-Lib" (1953). Following her third marriage in 1953, Lynne retired from acting. Her fourth husband in 1971 would be former professional wrestler Don Sebastian, but the couple was estranged at the time of Lynne's untimely death. On December 16, 1977, she had a slip-and-fall accident in her home and suffered severe head fractures and lacerations. She went into a coma and died a few months later on April 1, 1978, from hemorrhaging.