Dorothy Dandridge & 9 Other Great Black Actors From Hollywoods Golden Age
Dorothy Dandridge & 9 Other Great Black Actors From Hollywood’s Golden Age
Contents
The golden age of Hollywood includes some of the most iconic Black screen stars of all time -including these amazing actors.
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The wonderful Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema was Hollywood’s most dream-like time. Cinema was new and so were stories on screen. Movie technology advanced at such a rapid pace that it was easy to amaze audiences with cinematography that had never been seen before. Audiences sought out movies for the thrill of newness and for the stories they had only ever been able to read about before.
During this period of the early and mid-twentieth century, many film genres were created and popularized, and many actors were manufactured by the highly stringent process of creating superstars. Film, like all creative mediums, is a product of its time, however. So Hollywood remained a very racist industry where Black actors struggled intensely to find acting jobs unless they played into racist stereotypes of their race.
10 Dorothy Dandridge
Born in 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio, Dorothy Dandridge lived a short life full of achievements. She worked as a theater actress on a number of films, although her greatest catalogs were in cinema. Some of her most popular works include Remains To Be Seen, Island In the Sun, and Carmen Jones. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her leading role as feisty temptress, Carmen, starring alongside Harry Belafonte in an operatic movie featuring an all-Black cast.
9 Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte popularized calypso music globally. His album, ‘Calypso’ spent 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard album charts and was the first album by a single artist to sell a million copies. Aside from his music career, Belafonte was also a Hollywood actor. He co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones a year after the two also starred in Bright Road. Belafonte’s career continued to grow in the late ’50s, with the Jamaican-American star appearing in movies with Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, and James Mason. He is remembered for his political activism, notably around racism in the 1950s and 1960s America.
8 Etta Moten Barnett
Etta Moten Barnett was an actress and a singer who beat many records as the first Black woman in the entertainment industry. The first Black woman to achieve international notoriety as a professional choral conductor. After appearing briefly on stage, Barnett moved on to auditioning for screen roles. In Gold Diggers Of 1933, Barnett plays a war widow who sings ‘Forgotten Man’ in remembrance of her deceased army husband.
” … until then Black actresses had been largely restricted to background roles as maids and eye-rolling, overweight nannies. Now here was a Black woman presented on an equal footing with Whites, and a sexy, sophisticated Black woman at that,” her obituary would later read. The next year, Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to sing the same song for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday, making Barnett the first Black entertainer to perform in The White House.
7 Eartha Kitt
Eartha Kitt was born in 1927 in a very small town in South Carolina. She began her career in 1943 in the first Black modern dance troupe, the Katherine Dunham company. Seven years later, she starred as Helen of Troy in Orson’s Wells theater production of Dr. Faustus. She continued to work heavily as a singer during the 1940s and 1950s, using her raspy and throaty voice to record songs like ‘Monotonous’. This raspy voice, for which she was known, would become even more popularized after she played Catwoman in the camp classic 1967 Batman series.
She also starred in a few films during this time, but her career in Hollywood was cut short in 1968 after she spoke out against the Vietnam war. The CIA branded her a “sadistic nymphomaniac,” and Kitt was forced to pursue a career in Europe. She would return to Hollywood during the ’90s.
6 Sidney Poitier
Bahamian-American, Sidney Poitier, is one of the most recognized stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Poitier’s first great success was in 1955 in Blackboard Jungle, a film that explores the problems of race in 1950s America. His career took off in 1958 when he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in The Defiant Ones in 1958. During the ’60s, Poitier also worked extensively as a Hollywood actor and received an Academy Award for Lilies Of The Field in 1963. He is best known for his portrayal of Dr. John Prentice in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, where he starred opposite Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
He is also remembered for his performance in To Sir, With Love and In The Heat Of The Night, also released in the late ’60s. The actor was also a prolific civil rights activist. He traveled with Harry Belafonte to the south for the Freedom Summer and also marched with Belafonte and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963 March on Washington.
5 Hattie McDaniel
The first Black person to win the Academy Awards for Best Actress, Hattie McDaniel is a controversial figure in Black history, because of her portrayal of “Mammy” in Gone With The Wind. Mammy was obviously a stereotypical portrayal of Black women and, although she won the Academy Awards, McDaniel had to sit at a segregated table at the side of the room, in accordance with segregation laws. She was also not permitted to attend the premiere of the movie because it was screened at a whites-only theater. Most of the roles she took were roles of the lazy, stupid, violent “Mammy” maid opposite white female stars like Vivien Leigh.
Although she was branded an “Uncle Tom” in the Black community, McDaniel argued that her increased wealth as an actress made up for the negative images that she consciously portrayed of Black Americans.
4 Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters had a long career as an entertainer. Born in 1896 in Pennsylvania, Waters began her career as a singer in Harlem. She was a hit jazz and swing singer during the 1920s. In 1933 she performed in Rufus Jones For President alongside an all-Black cast. She still worked as a singer during this time, earning the nickname, “Sweet Mama Stringbean” for her seductive style of singing. She soon moved to Hollywood and, in the ’40s, appeared in six movies, including the 1949 movie, Pinky.
Waters was the first Black woman to star in her own TV show, The Ethel Waters Show, which aired on NBC in 1939.
3 Pearl Bailey
Pearl Bailey was a very successful actor and singer in Hollywood. Born in 1918 in Virginia, Bailey won a Tony Award for her performance as Dolly in the all-Black production of the hit musical, Hello, Dolly! She also starred in Carmen Jones and as Maria in Porgy And Bess, a hit musical featuring an all-Black cast, with performances by Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sammy Davis Jr. Bailey also hosted her own show, The Pearl Bailey Show in 1971. By 1986, she would win a Daytime Emmy for her role as fairy godmother in Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale.
2 Lena Horne
One of America’s most popular names in entertainment, Lena Horne was a singer, dancer, and actor. She starred in a number of films in the 1940s, including Panama Hattie, Cabin In The Sky, and Two Girls And A Sailor. In the next decade, however, Horne would slowly disentangle herself from Hollywood, because she was being typecast. Even so, she was blacklisted during the Red Scare, because of her associations with communist groups. She returned briefly to Hollywood in 1969 and 1978, preferring to work as a singer instead.
1 Sammy Davis Jr.
Born to entertainer parents, Davis began his career dancing in clubs and singing the blues. Davis was in the army prior to that, and suffered terrible racist abuse from white soldiers, many of which was physical. During his entertainment career, Davis worked relentlessly to break racial barriers for Black entertainers. He appeared in a lot of Hollywood movies, including Poggy And Bess, Ocean’s 11, and Pepe. With a long career in entertainment, Davis won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and an Emmy Award in 1990. In 2008, he was inducted into the International Civil Rights Walk Of Fame.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/dorothy-dandridge-hollywood-golden-age-best-black-actors/
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