Actress and singer who starred in Dynasty
Born: July 17, 1935;
Died: October 4, 2019
DIAHANN Carroll, who has died of cancer aged 84, broke through racial barriers as one of the first African-American actresses to appeal to white audiences, as the star of the sitcom Julia in the 1960s, and later as the glamorous singer Dominique Deveraux in the glossy soap opera Dynasty in the 1980s.
Off screen Carroll was an elegant and glamorous figure, who challenged racial prejudices with a string of relationships with white men at a time when interracial relationships were more controversial in the United States than they are today.
She was engaged to the broadcaster Sir David Frost in the 1970s and her four husbands included the singer Vic Damone. She also had a lengthy relationship with black actor Sidney Poitier, though he was married to someone else at the time.
On screen Carroll stirred up controversy in the US as the star of the sitcom Julia (1968-71), which is regarded as the first American television series to star an African-American woman in a role that was not stereotypical, such as a maid.
Articulate and beautiful, Carroll played the title character Julia, a widow with a young son. She worked as a nurse, not in ER or A&E, but with an aerospace company, and it seemed almost incidental that she was black - and that in itself attracted criticism.
The show was attacked for ignoring the racial tensions in American society. Race was touched on only very lightly. “Have you always been a Negro or are you just trying to be fashionable?” asks her boss in the first episode.
Writing in the now-defunct Saturday Review magazine, Robert Lewis Shayon complained that the comfortable suburban milieu of the show’s setting was “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America's explosion potential”. Carroll admitted that the show presented “the white Negro”.
Her character wore elegant clothes, looked perfect and lived in a beautiful apartment. And nothing ever seemed to get on top of her. Irrespective of race, the role seemed far removed from that of single mothers juggling work and child care.
Race relations and tensions were a minefield for Carroll, who won a Golden Globe to add to the Tony she had won in 1962 for the Broadway musical No Strings. “I was not ignorant about the issues of civil rights in this country, or my place as a national celebrity who could voice opinions to help make changes,” she said in her memoir The Legs Are the Last to Go – Aging, Acting, Marrying and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way (2008).
Julia ran for three seasons and 86 episodes from 1968 to 1971. In its first season it was in the US TV Top Ten, but the third season did not make the Top 30.
Carroll was born Carol Diann Johnson in 1935 in the New York borough of The Bronx, though she grew up largely in Harlem, perhaps the most iconic black neighbourhood in America. Like Julia, her mother was a nurse. Her father worked on the New York subway as a conductor.
She showed early promise as a singer, attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, modelled for Ebony magazine and won a television talent show called Chance of a Lifetime when she was 18.
That effectively launched her showbusiness career and she landed a supporting role in the film musical Carmen Jones (1954), the black adaptation of Bizet’s opera starring Dorothy Dandrige and Harry Belafonte.
Carroll also made her Broadway debut in 1954 in the musical House of Flowers and so impressed Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein) that he wanted to cast her in Flower Drum Song. But, despite showbiz’s relaxed approach to ethnic casting at the time, it seems no amount of make-up could turn an African-American into a Chinese-American. Rodgers later wrote a part with her specifically in mind in No Strings.
Carroll supported Dandridge again in the film Porgy and Bess (1959), which also starred Sidney Poitier. Her character sings the classic Summertime, but music supervisor Andre Previn decided her voice was too low and she was dubbed on the soundtrack by a soprano.
Carroll and Poitier became involved romantically off-screen. She claimed that Poitier was keen for them to divorce their current spouses and marry each other. But while she divorced her first husband, record producer Monte Kay, Poitier remained married for several more years. Carroll and Poitier continued their relationship throughout most of the 1960s, but never married.
She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Claudine (1974), in which she played a single mother struggling to bring up six children in Harlem, and she appeared on numerous television shows, both as an actress and singer.
In Dynasty (1984-87) and its spin-off The Colbys (1985-86) she played Dominique Deveraux, the nasty mixed-race half-sister that tycoon Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) knew nothing about till she turned up in season four. “I wanted to be the first black bitch on television,” said Carroll.
Three of Carroll’s marriages ended in divorce. Her third husband died in a car crash. She is survived by a daughter from her first marriage.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
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