LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Dorothy Dandridge
built 616 days ago
Dorothy Dandridge is the Oscar-nominated actress whose career as a leading lady was curtailed by racism and personal problems in the 1950s. As teens she and her sister Vivian were part of an act known as the Dandridge Sisters; they were good enough to reach New York's famous Cotton Club, and from there Dorothy worked her way into small movie parts in Hollywood. She married dancer Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers in 1942, but it wasn't until they divorced in 1949 that Dandridge's career really took off. A charismatic and striking beauty, she began touring as a nightclub singer. Her big Hollywood break came when she starred as the sultry heroine of the 1954 film Carmen Jones, an adaptation of the Bizet opera Carmen. The film was a hit, and Dandridge became the first African-American woman ever nominated for an Academy Award as best actress.
Source:
Just as with the rest of America, Hollywood, in the 1940's, was even more racially divided than it remains to be today; and Dorothy Dandridge, a singer and movie actress, was well-aware of that fact. As one of the Dandridge Sisters singing trio, and the child of a "mammy"-playing actress (Loretta Devine, as Ruby Dandridge), she had a hard row to tow in breaking Hollywood's/America's color barriers (along with the likes of Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Lena Horne) in becoming the first Black woman nominated for an Academy Award. Beautiful, sexy, and talented, Dandridge was still very aware that, after the curtain went down, she was "just a Negro" in the eyes of an audience that could cheer her performance, but wouldn't deign to share a dip in the pool with her. The men who played her like a violin - from Harold Nicholas (Obba Babatunde) of the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, to the director, Otto Preminger (Klaus Maria Brandauer), and especially the slimy Jack Dennison (D.B. Cooper) - were another matter entirely: in varying degrees, they cared not about the color of her face, but more about the color of her money.
Source:
Dorothy Dandridge began singing in her church's choir. Ruby Dandridge—an ambitious, small-time local performer who would become a successful stage and screen actress—created an act with Dorothy and her sister that performed as "The Wonder Children"; Dorothy Dandridge was only age four. The "Wonder Children" toured in the South for five years with Ruby's lesbian partner Geneva Williams while Ruby, for the most part, continued working and performing in Ohio. Some biographies document this period as the start of the sexual abuse Dorothy would suffer from Geneva until adolescence. Dorothy toured non-stop and seldom attended school during this period. With the start of the Great Depression, work for the Wonder Children dried up as it did for many of the "Chitlin' Circuit" performers.
Source:
In 1941, Dorothy Dandridge began her movie career with a role in LADY FROM LOUISIANA. She came to the movies from a long career as a stage entertainer. Her mother was a comedienne and her father was a Cleveland minister. She performed in vaudeville with her sister Vivian. At fifteen she, her sister, and another black girl appeared as the Dandridge Sisters and toured the country in a musical performance. She was sixteen when she performed at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem.
Source:
Dorothy Dandridge was born on November 9, 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio. As an actress, Dandridge was one of Hollywood's legendary beauties and a Black woman of several 'firsts'. A successful nightclub singer, in 1951 she was the first Black to perform in the Empire Room of New York's famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Landing the leading role in the 1954 all-Black musical Carmen Jones, Dandridge became the first Black female to be nominated for an-Oscar as Best Actress. From this performance, her career skyrocketed and in 1957, she was paired with white actor John Justin in the movie “Island in the Sun”. This interracial romance film ... presented a first, as Dandridge became the first Black woman to be held in the arms of a white man on the silver screen.
Source:
Dorothy Dandridge was born in Ohio in 1922. She toured America with sister and mother, performing in Baptist churches before Los Angeles put her on the screen. Her roles were largely stereotypical black ones, as with her sisters in the Marx Brothers' A Day at The Races. Among her film roles were a southern schoolteacher in Bright Road (1953) and the title roles in Carmen Jones (1954) and Otto Preminger's production of Porgy and Bess (1959). Dorothy Dandridge was twice married and had an institutionalised child. She became bankrupt and was found dead in 1965.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Dorothy Dandridge