Groundbreaking TV star Diahann Carroll dies at 84
Diahann Carroll, who changed the course of television history as the first African American woman to shatter stereotypes, in 1968’s ground-breaking sitcom Julia,
and to win a lead actress Tony Award, has died. She was 84.
The Oscar-nominated actress and breast cancer survivor, who also starred in Dynasty and White Collar, died of cancer, her daughter Suzanne Kay said Friday.
Carroll burst on the scene among the first black actresses to star in studio films. Assisted by her breathy, deep voice, the established recording artist debuted on the big screen in 1954’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of Carmen Jones, a retelling of the Bizet opera with an all-black cast, alongside Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Pearl Bailey. In 1959, she headlined the musical Porgy and Bess with Dandridge, Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr.
The dynamic entertainer, whose TV credits also include A Different World and Grey’s Anatomy, sang in nightclubs and on the Broadway stage, headlined in Las Vegas with her fourth husband, Vic Damone, and notched Emmy, Grammy and Golden Globe nominations. Carroll was nominated for a lead-actress Oscar for her turn as a welfare mom in the 1974 comedy Claudine and earned a Tony Award in 1962 for Richard Rodgers’s No Strings.
In the late 1960s, Carroll was cast in Julia, the enormously successful NBC sitcom that featured her as a war-widowed nurse raising a son. The pioneering role was a departure from predecessors that typically tapped black women to play domestic workers, and was credited with shattering stereotypes ahead of The Cosby Show, which didn’t premiere until 1984.
“That experience for television,” she said in a 2011 interview with the Archive of American Television, “everyone was on the line and everyone was scared because we were saying to the country, ‘We’re going to present a very upper middle-class black woman raising her child and her major concentration will not be about suffering in the ghetto. We don’t know if you’re going to buy it but this is what we’re going to do. Take a different point of view of blacks in the United States.’”
In the Aaron Spelling hit series Dynasty, Carroll embodied another atypical black woman on television: the deliciously catty Dominique Deveraux, Blake Carrington’s long-lost, illegitimate half-sister, whom she emphatically dubbed the “first black bitch on prime-time television.”
“Very often it has been made light of. I think it is important that we allow actors who represent the Third World to portray roles that are not necessarily sympathetic,” she told The Washington Post in 1985. “And the other end of the spectrum that we are offered very often is we are so sympathetic, so wonderful, so good and so marvelous that we are totally unbelievable. Somewhere in the middle, I thought it would be interesting to try to create a new character. There are some things about Dominique that are perfectly likable, there are other things that are completely self-centered. And I think she will remain that way.”
Perhaps taking a page out of Deveraux’s handbook, Carroll persevered in Hollywood with her long-cultivated combination of class and sass, turning heads with her extravagant taste in clothing and lavish lifestyle.
“Dominique brought a shot in the arm when Dynasty needed it. I had a hell of a good time when I was there,” she told TV Guide.
BORN CAROL Diahann Johnson in 1935 in the Bronx, she moved to Harlem with her parents at a young age. With their support, she enrolled in dance, singing and modeling classes and attended Music and Art High School with Billy Dee Williams, who would later costar with her in Dynasty, Lonesome Dove: The Series and the widely panned Star Wars Christmas Special. By 15, the leggy teen was modeling for Ebony, and by 18 she got her big singing break after winning the televised talent show Chance of a Lifetime in 1954. She received a cash prize in addition to being booked at the famed Latin Quarter nightclub in New York City.
Later that year, she hit the big screen as a bit player in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Carmen Jones with Dandridge and Belafonte and made her Broadway debut in House of Flowers.
“I loved every moment of it,” she told The Times of her early break. “I just assumed everyone’s career went through the same machinations. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how fortunate I had been.”
The stage musical, a collaboration of Truman Capote and Harold Arlen, flopped despite the impressive talent roster that included Pearl Bailey and Alvin Ailey in the cast and Peter Brook directing. Hollywood wasn’t that friendly to Carroll either when she auditioned in the 1950s – Los Angeles was less integrated than New York.
“We have to remember we didn’t see movies or television that involved black people. That didn’t make me comfortable,” she said, noting that producers “treated me like a novelty, not like I am an actress. You have to go away from those people. You must stay within your range.”
While working on House of Flowers, Carroll fell for casting director Monte Kay, with whom she had daughter Suzanne. She was only a teenager and they “had a lot of growing up to do,” she said, but was grateful for the union because it produced her daughter.
It only took a few days into working on 1959’s Porgy and Bess for Poitier to take notice of his beautiful costar, whose nine-year love affair with him would result in the demise of his first marriage, to model Juanita Harvey.
“She had fantastic cheekbones, perfect teeth and dark, mysterious eyes,” Poitier said of Carroll in People magazine. “She was confident, inviting, sensuous – and she moved with a rhythm that absolutely tantalized me. I invited her to dinner, telling her that since we were both married we would talk about our absent loved ones. And we did. I acted very, very gentlemanly for weeks, but halfway through the picture we fell in love. As I got to know her, I realized she was one of the brightest women I had ever known.”
The two were paired again for 1961’s romantic musical Paris Blues, but it took Poitier six years to end his marriage, which he stayed in for the sake of his four children. After his divorce, he requested that he and Carroll live together for six months so he “wouldn’t be jumping from one marriage straight into another. But she wouldn’t do it. It was then that our relationship started to unravel.”
Carroll, a self-described “terrible romantic, just ridiculously so,” continued to make headlines with her love life.
She was married briefly to a Las Vegas businessman, but dismissed that episode as “a silly marriage and a silly divorce.” She was briefly engaged to English journalist David Frost, but they never married. Her third husband, Robert A. DeLeon, was much younger than she was, but she said he was “a complex, brilliant young man.”
Carroll’s musical stage credits also include a long run in the mid-1990s as Norma Desmond in the Toronto production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of “Sunset Boulevard.” In 2010, she starred in an autobiographical musical one-nighter at the Annenberg Theatre in Palm Springs, “Diahann Carroll: The Lady, The Music, The Legend,” which PBS taped for subsequent airing that fall.
(Los Angeles Times/TNS)