Donna Mae Roberts was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of Walter Roberts and Cora H. Myers. She went to the University in California, where she majored in psychology and belonged to two honorary scholastic fraternities. She left her classes at the end at the end of her junior year to join the chorus. Roberts started as a "Goldwyn girl" in movies and was a chorus girl in a couple of Busby Berkeley movies. She also played small parts in Warner Bros. movies of the 1930s.

Donna Mae Roberts had the highest intelligence quotient of 54 chorus girls given a bona fide test by Prof. Neil Warren of the university of Southern California. Her IQ rating was 132, which falls in the "near Genius" class. Since the test, Donna Mae Roberts was acclaimed: "The smartest chorus girl in Hollywood".

Her career started to decline in the late 1930s; during that period she did some work as an extra and then retired from the screen.

Her first husband was Paul Spark, who died in 1943. Her second husband was Robert Roderick, with whom she had a son.

Roberts died at the Cottonwood Care Center in Gardnerville in 1996. Her body was cremated at Fitzhenry's Crematory.