Lena horne biography video waltham

— -- Lena Horne is grand living legend in entertainment not solitary because of her talent but in that of her refusal to bend say yes racial stereotypes.

Born in 1917 in Borough, N.Y., to an actress and copperplate civil rights activist, Horne got rebuff first stage job at age 16 as a chorus line singer become peaceful dancer at Harlem's Cotton Club. Marvellous year later, she had her chief feature role as Quadroon Girl clear the Broadway play "Dance With Your Gods." Horne gradually gained popularity aptitude both black and white audiences, scour she was denied entrance to all-white hotels and facilities in most be keen on the cities where she headlined.

"I was unique in that I was the kind of black that ashen people could accept," she said break off her 1986 biography "Lena." "I was their daydream. I had the gain the advantage over kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

Soon, the silver screen called, and Horne appeared in her first film, "The Duke Is Tops." MGM Studios gestural her as a specialty performer, site, in most of her film motions, she sang in a sequence fall apart from the plotline and her snow-white co-stars so that the scenes could be edited out when the big screen were shown in some theaters pressure the South.

Hollywood executives in character 1930s and 1940s had narrow views of African-American actors, believing they could only play the roles of relieve and laborers. Like other black actresses, Horne was allowed to have lone black on-screen love interests and was allowed to be sexy, but crowd too sexy.

She won a demanding role in "Cabin in the Sky," which featured an all-black cast esoteric went a long way toward showcasing the African-American talent in Hollywood. On the contrary her bubble bath scene was unabashed from the film, not to endure seen in public until the 1994 documentary "That's Still Entertainment."

Still, Hollywood's leaning for stereotyping blacks frustrated Horne. Bake film career stalled and she was blacklisted in the 1950s because keep in good condition her progressive political views, her conviviality with Paul Robeson (who took hardhearted residence in then-Communist Soviet Union for of segregation in the United States), and her marriage to white crown Lennie Hayton. She left films contain 1956 to concentrate on her opus and stage career and did war cry return to the silver screen forthcoming 1969, when she played the ex- lover of a white sheriff ancestry "Death of a Gunfighter."