Susan Mills (aka Roberta Susan Lean) is an actress/director/producer.  She met and married Steve Mills, a legendary Burlesque actor, and became a performer and director with him in Burlesque, night clubs, and television throughout the country.  Her first professional job in Philadelphia was in The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour.  At 19 she left Philadelphia to go to New York to continue her acting career.  She lived at the YWCA which was like a club where other budding performers were living.  Donna McKechnie, Freda Payne, and Nicole David were some of them.  She became a union usher to survive.  As an usher she was able to see every show as often as she wished, and took that opportunity to network with producers, stage managers, and composers.  She often sat in the mezzanine with voice coaches and directors working on the show being watched and they would ask her if a certain song was working, what the audience was saying, or how an actor was doing in the role. 

 The Ushers’ Union could place her at every theater for every performance.  Many aspiring actors started out as ushers and orange juice sellers; Dustin Hoffman was one of them.  This was ‘graduate school’ for her.  In 1964, during the run of David Carradine’s The Deputy, the stage manager, who knew she was a beginning actor, asked her if she wanted to “jump into’” a non-speaking role because she fit the costume.  Mills (then ‘Lean’) got her Equity card!!  She went on to do ‘background’ work in Up The Down Staircase with Sandy Dennis, The Patty Duke Show, and Mr. Budwing with James Garner.  Working at Shelley’s Coffee Shop as a cashier, she was approached by a man, who asked if she could sing.  She said yes and they went to the Brill Building, passing Neil Sedaka in his cubicle, to have her sing ‘Lipstick On Your Collar.’  She was then signed to a contract for 20^th Century Fox.  The first show she was cast in was for a Yiddish theater play called GO FIGHT CITY HALL as Bruce Adler’s sister.  It played in The Mayfair Theatre (the old Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe).  Irving and Henrietta Jacobson were also in the show.  Meanwhile a friend, in Ann Corio’s show THIS IS BURLESQUE, wanted to leave and asked her to take over her role.  Once in the show, she did all her scenes with Steve Mills.  They married and worked together in Burlesque, lived in Rhode Island, and did local night club engagements, until his death in 1988.  She now works as an actress in Florida and is an Adjunct Professor of Reading and Writing at St. Petersburg College.

‘Vaudeville’ was a series of variety acts, ‘Burlesque’ was made up of comic scenes, including satire and parody (an umbrella of comedy that is larger than life).  The original Burlesque, in its purest form, was known as “the poor man’s musical comedy.  Burlesque comedy is larger than life, an exaggeration of the normal in everyday life.  It started in England in the 1600s and goes back to Weber and Fields here in America.  Mills entered the world of Burlesque by marriage and hasn’t ever regretted a minute of her 22 years of being in Burlesque, and her wonderful 22 years of marriage to a kind, gentle, caring, funny man.  He was a soulful person and had the time of his life in every burlesque minute.  In Burlesque she was known as Susan Mills and did not use her birth/Actors’ Equity name, Roberta Lean.  If destiny permits, she hopes to return to the Broadway stage, but it just might be that she lives the rest of her life in Florida, teaching, writing, painting, and doing local theater.  She is grateful for her wonderful love-filled life.