And now, sad news … the fabulous Diahann Carroll died this week at the age of eighty-four.
Miss Carroll, and she deserves Miss Carroll, started her career as a nightclub singer in 1954. And in that same year she made her film debut in Carmen Jones alongside Dorothy Dandridge. She also appeared in the film version of Porgy & Bess before taking on the groundbreaking television role of Julia, where she played the first non-stereotypical African American female character on television. Julia was not a maid, but was a nurse raising her son on her own after her husband was killed in Vietnam.
Miss Carroll said this of Julia:
“We’re going to present a very upper middle-class black woman raising her child, and her major concentration is not going to be about suffering in the ghetto. Many people were incensed about that. They felt that [African Americans] didn’t have that many opportunities on television or in film to present our plight as the underdog … they felt the [real-world] suffering was much too acute to be so trivial as to present a middle-class woman who is dealing with the business of being a nurse. But we were of the opinion that what we were doing was important, and we never left that point of view … We were of a mind that this was a different show. We were allowed to have this show.”
Miss Carroll received a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination for Julia. When that show ended, Miss Carroll starred in the title role in the 1974 movie Claudine and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.
And then came the 80s … and back to television for Dynasty where she would become Dominique Deveraux, Blake Carrington’s half-sister, from 1984 to 1987. Miss Carroll pushed to have that role created especially for her, saying:
“They’ve done everything. They’ve done incest, homosexuality, murder. I think they’re slowly inching their way toward interracial. I want to be wealthy and ruthless … I want to be the first black bitch on television.”
And she was, and she was fabulous at it.
After Dynasty she played Whitley’s mom on A Different World—and received another Emmy nomination—and guest starred on Soul Food, Whoopi and Grey’s Anatomy. On the stage, she appeared in House of Flowers, No Strings—for which she won a Tony—Agnes of God, Love Letters, A Raisin in the Sun, On Golden Pond, and as an African American Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
She was fierce and fabulous.
RIP Miss Carroll.
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