LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Nell Carter: New York
built 233 days ago
In 1981, Carter took the role of Miss Nellie Ruth "Nell" Harper, a smart and sassy housekeeper on the television sitcom, Gimme a Break. She portrayed a matronly mother figure to a white California family headed by a widower who was the town police chief. The show ran until 1987, and gave Carter a place in popular culture. She earned two Emmy award nominations for her role, which "revived the archetype of the mammy, an African-American woman caring for a white family," Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times. In February of 1985, an episode of Gimme a Break was broadcast live--which was the first time a sitcom has aired live in almost 30 years. The cast performed the episode flawlessly, and at the end of the show, Carter "threw up her arms and yelled 'We did it!'" according to the Washington Post.
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In the mid 1990s, Carter appeared on Broadway in a revival of Annie as Miss Hannigan. She was very upset when commercials promoting the show used a different actress, Marcia Lewis, who is white, as Miss Hannigan. The producers claimed that the commercials, which were made during an earlier production, were too costly to reshoot. Carter felt that racism played a part in the decision. "Maybe they don't want audiences to know Nell Carter is black," she told the New York Post. However, the ads did mention that Carter was in the show.
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Her CD, "Neurotic by Nature," recorded in 1999 at the LA Improv, features Nell Carter singing a parody that Michele wrote. In 2004, Michele released her first DVD, "LIVE! Just Barely," recorded at Joe's Pub in New York.
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"Maybe they don't want audiences to know Nell Carter is black," she told the New York Post at the time. The producers said it was too costly to shoot a new commercial, though the spot did mention that Carter was the new star. "It hurts a lot," Carter told the Post. "I've asked them nicely to stop it — it's insulting to me as a black woman."
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Despite her short stature, Carter "was a larger-than-life stage personality who never did things in half-measures," Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times. Along with popular singers Patti LaBelle and Jennifer Holliday, he continued, Carter "belonged to a select circle of theatrical pop-soul belters whose members reveled in high-powered vocal flamboyance. A typical performance by Ms. Carter reached into the fabric of a song and tore out its seams with feral flourishes."
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On this day in 1920 actor Joe Yule Jr - better known as Mickey Rooney - was born in Brooklyn, New York to Scottish-born vaudevillain/actor Joe Yule and Nell Carter. Mickey was best known in his youth for playing Andy Hardy with Judy Garland in cheerfully naïve musicals that usually ended up
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