Diahann Carroll

Trailblazing African-American actress who played a jetsetter in ‘Dynasty’ and was engaged to marry David Frost

DIAHANN Carroll, who has died aged 84, became the first African-American woman to star in her own television show, and later played the black singer Dominique Deveraux in the 1980s soap opera Dynasty.

It was a role in which she defied the black television stereotype, and not for the first time. “She enters dripping with white fur,” admired one critic. “Beneath it is a top-ofthe-line designer dress. Her nose brushes the ceiling.”

Nearly 20 years earlier, in the late 1960s, Diahann Carroll had taken a pioneering lead for black actresses by starring as a struggling young single mother in the drama series Julia. Her arrival in Dynasty represented another milestone.

“Women aren’t supposed to have power,” Diahann Carroll declared, when asked about her role as the domineering jetsetter Dominique Deveraux. “Certainly, black women have never had any power on TV before. Now it’s time for black women to play ‘the powerful lady’.”

In the early 1970s she was poised to marry the British television personality David Frost, then in his early thirties and one of London’s most eligible bachelors, who had his own nightly show on American TV.

But although the couple announced their engagement in November 1972, she dumped him following a slide in his ratings, and the decision by stations in the American south to cancel his programme.

By then Diahann Carroll had earned a reputation as a fiery anti-racism campaigner, only to be accused of selling out to the white establishment as a successful actress and glamorous middle-of-the-road cabaret singer.

Articulate, opinionated and cultured, she parried such charges by pointing out that she had been a black artist competing in a white world. “I’m acceptable,” she explained, noting that her skin tone was redolent of cafe-aulait. “I’m a black woman with a white image. I don’t scare the audience.”

Her road to stardom was anything but trouble-free. As an ambitious black teenager she had wanted to conquer Hollywood, but realised that the only black parts on offer were either those of perfect mother figures or hookers. Producers would not cast her in grittier roles for fear of being thought racist.

In the mid-1950s she addressed her anger at her predicament during four years of psychoanalysis and drug therapy, including controlled doses of LSD.

Diahann Carroll first came to notice in 1954 when, at the age of 19, she was cast as Myrt, a bit part in the film Carmen Jones, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Harry STARDOM: ‘Dynasty’ star Diahann Carroll Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey.

Five years later she returned to the big screen to play a supporting role in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, also directed by Preminger, who used virtually the same black cast but added Sammy Davis Jr as the drug dealer Sportin’ Life and replacing Belafonte with Sidney Poitier, with whom Diahann Carroll became romantically linked.

Diahann Carroll married four times, first to the record producer Monte Kay with whom she had a daughter. In 1973, having jilted David Frost, she married a Las Vegas boutique tycoon, Fred Glusman, only to file for divorce within a matter of weeks citing physical abuse.

Her third husband, Robert DeLeon, whom she married in 1975, was killed in a car crash two years later. Her fourth and final marriage, in 1987, to the singer Vic Damone, ended in divorce in 1996.

Diahann Carroll, born July 17, 1935, died on October 4.