Black-ish star Tracee Ellis Ross nabbed best actress in a TV series, comedy or musical at the Golden Globes in January — making her the first African-American to win in that category since 1983.
But, as she explained to Ellen DeGeneres on Thursday, April 20, shortly after she won the coveted prize, the 44-year-old accidentally left it in the ladies’ room!
Planning to change dresses for the awards’ afterparties, she and a friend had taken over the handicapped stall in a bathroom just off the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton. “I couldn’t get in and out of the dress by myself,” she explained. Then, as she waited “in a G-string and pasties,” Ellis recalled, her friend ran off to get her stylist.
“I stood there for 20 minutes, naked, in the bathroom, with no service on my phone,” she told DeGeneres, “waiting — hoping — they made it in!”
In the hullabaloo that followed, Ross lost track of her Golden Globe: “You know that feeling when you go to the airport and you’re like, I know I forgot something — please don’t say it’s my license, please don’t say it’s my license. And I realize it’s my pants?”
By the time she returned, the statuette was nowhere to be found. “I was a winner,” she joked. “Who had lost.”
Ross — currently on the cover of both Good Housekeeping and Health — assured the audience that the award was ultimately returned to her by security personnel. Nonetheless, DeGeneres gifted her with a blinged-out tracking device, demonstrating with one of her own eight Emmys. Hoping to add that award to her trophy case, Ross posed with it, quipping, “I want to put that out to the universe!”
