Diahann Carroll, the Oscar-nominated actor 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 of cancer on Friday in Los Angeles.
During a long career, Carroll earned a Tony award for the musical No Strings and an Academy Award nomination for Claudine.
But she was perhaps best known in her home country for her pioneering work on Julia. Carroll played Julia Baker, a nurse whose husband had been killed in Vietnam, in the groundbreaking situation comedy that aired from 1968 to 1971.
Following news of her death, 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.
NBC executives were wary about putting Julia on the network during the racial unrest of the 1960s, but it was an immediate hit.
It had its critics, including some who said 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 an American high-fashion model in Paris who has a love affair with a white American 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”.
Opening doors
She appeared often in plays previously considered exclusive territory for white actors: Same Time, Next Year, Agnes of God and Sunset Boulevard (as faded star Norma Desmond, the role 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.
Her film career was sporadic. She began with a secondary role in Carmen Jones in 1954 and five years later appeared in Porgy and Bess, although her singing voice was dubbed because it was not considered strong enough for the Gershwin opera.
Her other films included Goodbye Again, Hurry Sundown, Paris Blues and The Split.
The 1974 film Claudine provided her most memorable role. She played a hard-bitten single mother of six who finds romance in Harlem with a binman played by James Earl Jones.
In the 1980s, she appeared in the long-running primetime soap opera Dynasty for three years. More recently, she had a number of guest slots and small roles in TV series, including playing the mother of Isaiah Washington’s character on Grey’s Anatomy.
She also returned to her roots in nightclubs. In 2006, she made her first club appearance in New York in four decades, singing at Feinstein’s at the Regency.
Reviewing a return engagement in 2007, a New York Times critic wrote that she sang Both Sides Now with “the reflective tone of a woman who has survived many severe storms and remembers every lightning flash and thunderclap”.
Early years
Carol Diann Johnson was born in New York City and attended the High School for the Performing Arts. Her father was a subway conductor and her mother a housewife.
She began her career as a model, but a prize from Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts TV show led to nightclub engagements.
In her 1998 memoir, Carroll traced her turbulent romantic life, which included liaisons with Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis jnr, Sidney Poitier and David Frost.
She even became engaged to Frost, but the engagement was cancelled.
An early marriage to nightclub owner Monte Kay resulted in Carroll’s only child, Suzanne, as well as a divorce. She also divorced her second husband, retail executive Freddie Glusman, later marrying magazine editor Robert DeLeon, who died.
Her most celebrated marriage was in 1987, to singer Vic Damone, and the two appeared together in nightclubs. But they separated in 1991 and divorced several years later.
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.
“We all look forward to the day that mastectomies, chemotherapy and radiation are considered barbaric,” Carroll told a gathering in 2000. – AP
