Diana Ross wept when she heard daughter Trace Ellis Ross’ songs from new movie The High Note

Tracee Ellis Ross admits she was ‘so shy, and so afraid’ of singing in public when she was a girl that she went to the headmistress’s office at her Swiss boarding school and begged to be excused from performing in a play.

‘I said I thought it was unfair I was being asked to sing,’ Ross recalled when we chatted about her first starring role in a feature film: playing a superstar diva in The High Note. 

Her character, Grace Davis, enjoys all the trappings that decades at the top have bought her. 

But her career has now reached the point where she’s being offered cushy residencies in Las Vegas….where music icons go to fade into the sunset.

The movie, which was released on VOD here last week, is fictional, by the way. 

Nothing to do with Tracee’s mother, the incomparable Miss Diana Ross, who was first among equals in The Supremes and a headliner in her own right for more than five decades.

The first time Tracee, 47, remembers singing in public was a few years before the incident at Institut Le Rosey in Rolle. 

She was still in school in New York and entered a talent show and performed an acapella version of Summertime (by Leonard Cohen, not the one from George Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess). 

‘It’s an obscure song of my mom’s,’ she told me, briskly. ‘I don’t even know what album it’s from.’ (As it happens, the track appeared on Diana Ross’s 1987 Red Hot Rhythm And Blues.)

At Le Rosey she performed in The Pirates Of Penzance. ‘I was in the choir,’ she blurted out before I could even ask whether she’d sung one of the featured parts.

Since then, she’s ‘dabbled’ in music — she sang over the opening credits of a tv show back in the Nineties — before landing roles in the hit series Girlfriends and Black-ish (she won a Golden Globe for the latter). 

Impressively, she can still remember the voiceover ditty, and gives me a few bars down the line from her home in Los Angeles (‘Cause I’m a TV girl, I live in your TV!’) before dissolving into giggles. 

‘I had little moments,’ she sighed, ‘and never tried to go beyond that. And then this movie comes along… at age 47!’

Soon, Tracee was in the studio, laying down the tracks she would perform as Grace Davis. In the film, Dakota Johnson plays Maggie, Grace’s smart assistant who knows the background to every one of her boss’s hits.

Strangely, given that her mother was the Queen of Motown, Tracee had little clue as to how a recording studio operated.

‘I knew where the mic was, but I didn’t know what the controls were for. For Christ’s sake, doesn’t someone just press the red button?!’ she joked, adding that she didn’t spend much time in the studio when she was a kid.

She has friends and siblings who are recording artists, ‘and obviously my mother’. But it wasn’t her scene. 

‘My mom recorded while we were sleeping, so she could be available when we were awake,’ she told me. ‘So, I didn’t get to sit and sleep in a recording studio.

‘We had a very regular life and my mom was there for dinner time, and to put us to bed, and to wake us up in the morning. She would record while we were sleeping.

‘Singing in a studio was all new to me,’ she said, possibly sneaking in a reference to a song called New To Me, which is the single from The High Note soundtrack. 

Tracee performs six numbers on it and despite her reluctance to get into the music world, boy can she sing.

She shares one track, Like I Do, with the superb up-and-coming actor Kelvin Harrison Jr., who plays a significant role in the lives of both Grace and her PA.

I watched the film twice before interviewing Tracee. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a bit of glossy, fluffy fun. 

Yet it’s underpinned by a screenplay that demands to know why women in show business (and other walks of life, too) are often dismissed as has-beens by the time they reach middle age.

‘Yes, it’s about the music industry,’ Tracee noted, ‘but it’s so identifiable on a personal level.

‘There’s no phase of your life where you should stop pursuing what you love,’ she said, when I asked about Grace being slighted by chauvinistic male music chiefs. 

‘We so often decide that these larger-than-life characters, like Grace, are not human.’ Indeed; and Tracee’s own personal situation imbues her portrait of the diva with a level of authenticity.

In the film, Grace and Maggie share an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music. I assumed that Tracee would have had musicology in her blood, too. 

‘Absolutely not, sir!’ she responded, so emphatically that we both laughed loudly, startling animals on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘My deep well of knowledge is in other areas,’ she said solemnly. (She studied drama at Ivy League college Brown.)

I already know, first-hand, of her deep interest in politics. We met at a lunch in Hollywood just before Trump’s inauguration and had a long conversation about what his occupation of the White House might lead to.

Right now, sadly, we’re witnessing some of the things we talked about.

I wondered aloud if her lack of interest in the music world was, consciously or subconsciously, a reaction to her mother’s global fame. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, adding: ‘I’m sure that’s a good one for a therapy session.’

Her mother hadn’t seen The High Note at the time of our conversation but during production last year Tracee played her some demo tracks of her singing.

‘I picked her up and we sat in my car. We were holding hands and crying as the songs played,’ she told me. ‘It was a special moment.’

And now, Tracee Ellis Ross wants to make more music — but as herself, not a character in a movie. ‘I would love to dive in and find producers to help me find what the Tracee sound is,’ she said. ‘I have some ideas!’ I bet she does.