AUSTIN – Noted Texas drama educator Ruth Denney died Monday at Hospice Austin's Christopher House of complications from a hip fracture suffered in early March. She was 92.

Ms. Denney founded one of the first public high schools devoted to the arts in the U.S. As a University of Texas professor, she educated an entire generation of theater educators. And as a high school drama teacher, she inspired nine-time Tony Award-winner Tommy Tune to pursue a career in show business.

Colleagues remember her straight-talking inspiration to both students and fellow educators.

"She was very honest in her reactions, but everybody respected her honesty because her expectations were very high," said Coleman Jennings, University of Texas drama professor. "She was bold, but she was always right on. It's a rare talent to be so direct. She always had [the student's] best interest in heart."

Born April 4, 1914, in Ohio, Ms. Denney was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University. After teaching for several years in Ohio, she moved to Houston.

She began her career in the 1950s in Houston, where she taught at Lamar High School. While she was there, her students won six state championships in the University Interscholastic League's one-act play contest. Mr. Tune was one of her students.

"High school theater was extremely important for me in helping to shape my later career," Mr. Tune told the Houston Chronicle in 2003.

After more than a dozen years in the classroom, Ms. Denney took an administrative job with the Houston Independent School District and began to scheme about creating a high school for the arts.

In 1971, she founded and became the first principal of Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, only the third such fine arts magnet school in the nation when it opened. Skeptics doubted the school would give students a solid education, and the school wasn't even accredited its first year.

"The art teachers cooperated, but the music and dance instructors – forget it, they didn't want to lose their best students to one school," Ms. Denney once told the Austin American-Statesman.

In addition to Mr. Tune, her students over the years have included notable performers such as Robert Crutchfield, Robert Foxworth, Carlin Glynn-Masterson, Paula Prentiss and Jaclyn Smith.

In 1976, Ms. Denney became a professor of drama education at the University of Texas at Austin. She taught at UT until 1988. At retirement she was named professor emeritus, and many of her former students and colleagues helped establish a scholarship in her honor. The Ruth Denney Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Theatre helps benefit theater arts students.

After her retirement, Ms. Denney was key in lobbying Austin Independent School District officials to establish the McCallum Fine Arts Academy at McCallum High School.

She is survived by her longtime companion, Jean Nipper, and three nieces.

Plans for a memorial service are pending.