Roberta Reardon heads the second-largest union of TV actors in the country. But you won't find her name in the credit listings on the IMDb website. The self-described blue-collar actress has earned a living doing mostly commercials, voice-overs and industrial videos.
Her time in the public spotlight has come not from acting but as president of Hollywood's 70,000-member American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. AFTRA, whose members also include radio announcers and recording artists, has long labored in the shadow of the bigger and more powerful Screen Actors Guild.
Reardon's important role in the negotiations came to light last week when the union negotiated a new three-year prime-time TV contract with the studios.
Although Reardon and her colleagues were not able to get an increase in residuals paid to actors from the sale of DVDs -- a long-sought goal -- they did nonetheless win higher pay for so-called middle-class actors -- those earning an average of $52,000.
More noteworthy, AFTRA reached a key compromise over the charged issue of how actors' images are exploited on the Internet. That was one of the issues that caused studios to break off earlier talks with SAG that resumed five days ago.
Reardon is credited with keeping the AFTRA talks alive when they threatened to derail and helping to craft a tentative contract that has its detractors among some hard-core members but also achieved gains that SAG could not a few weeks earlier. SAG leaders were plain about their worries: They thought AFTRA would cut a raw deal.
"She said the best way we can prove that people are wrong about us is to give them the best contract we can get," said actress Tess Harper, a member of the federation's negotiating committee who is also a former board member of SAG.
Reardon, who lives in New York and has been on the AFTRA national board for nearly a decade, was elected president last July after the board tapped her to complete the remainder of the term of her friend John Connolly, the veteran union leader who resigned to head Actors Equity Assn., which represents stage actors and stage managers.
It was a serendipitous rise for an actress whose stage and screen career was largely limited to the likes of New Jersey regional theater and a few minor roles in soaps such as "Another World," in which she played a nurse. She later established a busy vocation doing training videos for industrial clients such as American Express Co. and commercials for the likes of Campbell's Soup and Kmart. "I did a lot of mommies," she explained.
