Pioneering black actress Diahann Carroll, 84

Diahann Carroll, the Oscar-nominated actress and singer who won critical acclaim as the first black woman to star in a non-servant role in a TV series, has died at the age of 84.

Carroll’s daughter Susan Kay told the Associated Press her mother died on Friday in Los Angeles of cancer.

During her career, Carroll earned a Tony Award for the musical No Strings and an Academy Award nomination for Claudine.

But she was best known for her pioneering work on Julia. Carroll played Julia Baker – a nurse whose husband was killed in Vietnam – from 1968 to 1971 in the groundbreaking sitcom.

Director Ava DuVernay paid tribute to an “icon”, saying Carroll “walked this earth for 84 years and broke ground with every footstep”.

Although she was not the first black woman to star in her own TV show (Ethel Waters played a maid in the 1950s series Beulah), she was the first to star as someone other than a servant.

Julia had its critics, with some saying Carroll’s character – the mother of a young son – was not a realistic portrayal of a black American woman in the 1960s.

“They said it was a fantasy,” Carroll recalled in 1998. “All of this was untrue. Much about the character of Julia I took from my own life, my family.”

Not shy when it came to confronting racial barriers, Carroll won her Tony portraying a model who has an affair with a white author in the 1959 Richard Rodgers musical No Strings.

Critic Walter Kerr described her as “a girl with a sweet smile, brilliant dark eyes and a profile regal enough to belong on a coin”.

She appeared often in plays previously considered exclusive territory for white actresses – Same Time, Next Year, Agnes Of God and Sunset Boulevard (as faded star Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson in the 1950 film).

“I like to think that I opened doors for other women, although that wasn’t my original intention,” she said in 2002.

The 1974 film Claudine provided her most memorable role. She played a single mother-of-six who finds romance with binman James Earl Jones.

In the 1980s, she appeared in the longrunning prime-time soap opera Dynasty.

More recently, she had a number of guest slots and small roles in TV series, including on Grey’s Anatomy.

In her 1998 memoir, Carroll traced her turbulent romantic life, which included liaisons with Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr, Sidney Poitier and David Frost. She was married four times. After she was treated for breast cancer in 1998, she spoke out for more money for research and for free screening for women who could not afford mammograms.

Picture: AP. Actress Diahann Carroll.