Ellen Holly, challenged racial barriers on TV

Ellen Holly, the first Black actor to play a lead role on daytime television, who broke barriers and sparked controversy on the soap opera “One Life to Live” starting in the late 1960s as a woman presumed to be white who becomes enmeshed in a love triangle involving a Black man, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.

Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, announced the death. No cause was given.

Ms. Holly, who faced difficulties getting roles early in her career as a light-skinned Black woman, became a fixture on “One Life,” an ABC daytime staple, from 1968 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1985.

She originally appeared on the show as a woman with a murky past, calling herself Carla Benari, who is treated by a white doctor, James Craig (Robert Milli), after experiencing a nervous breakdown. From the outset, the character, who is presumed to be Italian American, raised questions in the minds of viewers.

“She wasn’t the usual blond, blue-eyed leading female,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 video interview. “She looked very exotic, and she had this very exotic name.”

Carla begins working as a receptionist for Craig and dating a Black intern, Price Trainor (Peter De Anda). She finds herself enmeshed in a mixed-race love triangle when Craig falls for her as well.

The plotline proved provocative in a country where racial tensions were bubbling over after years of bloody struggles during the civil rights era and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”

Not all viewers were happy to go along for the ride. A station in Lubbock, Texas, canceled “One Life to Live,” the show’s creator, Agnes Nixon, said in a 1997 video interview, and some viewers wrote angry letters. A man in Seattle, she said, sent a rambling letter protesting a scene in which Carla kissed Trainor. “But I’m getting confused,” Nixon recalled him stating. “If she turns out to be Black, I want to protest her kissing the white doctor.”

The show eventually revealed that Carla’s real last name was Gray and that she was the runaway daughter of a widowed Black woman, Sadie Gray, another long-running character on the show. Carla, it turned out, had been chasing stardom as an actress, but she had failed to find success as a Black woman, even after passing herself off as white.

The plotline had particular resonance for Ms. Holly, who herself identified as Black but also had French, English, and Shinnecock ancestry. She originally caught Nixon’s attention after writing a lengthy letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times in 1968 about the difficulties faced by actors like her who had lighter skin, and whom some critics deemed not Black enough.

“Black is not a color of skin, it is a state of mind,” Ms. Holly wrote. “However white I might appear, I am Black because my experience has been a Black experience. From the time I first went to school, got called the usual ugly names and learned the brutal realities of being an outsider, no day has been without its traumas — jobs I could not qualify for because I was Black, apartments I could not rent, opportunities I was denied.”

In a guest column in the Times the next year, Ms. Holly wrote that she had not been optimistic when initially approached about the role. “If you’re Black, you don’t get white parts, and if you’re a ‘Black who looks white’ you don’t get Black parts either.”

“What most people don’t realize,” she continued, “is that even when there’s a part for a ‘Black who looks white,’ it never goes to a Black person, but to a white one. Follow? I know ... I know ... it’s hard for me, too.”

Ellen Virginia Holly was born on Jan. 16, 1931, in Manhattan, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her father, William Garnet Holly, was a chemical engineer, and her mother, Grayce Holly, was a writer. She came from a long line of activists, including Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a maternal aunt, who was the only woman on the planning committee for the civil rights March on Washington in 1963.

Ms. Holly never married or had children. She leaves several cousins, grandnieces, and other family members.