actress; singer
Personal Information
Born November 9, 1922, in Cleveland, OH; died September 8, 1965, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Cyril and Ruby (an entertainer and actress; maiden name, Butler) Dandridge; married Harold Nicholas (a dancer), 1942 (divorced); married John (Jack) Denison (a nightclub owner), 1959 (divorced, 1963); children: (first marriage) Harolyn (daughter).
Education: Self-educated; studied acting at the Actors' Laboratory; studied singing with Phil Moore.
Career
Actress and singer. Performed as child entertainer in the South, 1926-1934; further stage performances in Los Angeles and small parts in films, 1934-1938; member of the singing Dandridge Sisters, performing in New York City's Cotton Club and in London, c. 1934-42; nightclub entertainer, late 1940s-1965. Actress in films, including Sundown, 1941; Lady from Louisiana, 1941; Bahama Passage, 1942; Drums of the Congo, 1942; Atlantic City, 1944; Pillow to Post, 1945; Tarzan's Peril, 1951; The Harlem Globetrotters, 1951; Bright Road, 1953; Carmen Jones, 1954; Island in the Sun, 1957; The Decks Ran Red, 1958; Porgy and Bess, 1959; Tamango, 1959; and Malaga, 1962.
Life's Work
In both her life and her films Dorothy Dandridge was given the opportunity to play only one role, that of the so-called "tragic mulatto," in which a beautiful, sensuous, light-skinned black woman fails to find acceptance among either whites or blacks and is doomed to a life of unhappiness and an early death. At the apex of her career in the mid-1950s, Dandridge was hailed as one of the world's most beautiful women, her picture graced the cover of Life magazine, and she became the first black star ever to be nominated for an Oscar in the category of best actor or actress.
But Hollywood in the 1950s had no place for a black "love goddess," as Ebony magazine described Dorothy Dandridge, and her career soon stagnated in a repetition of the tragic mulatto character, her talent and charisma never fully exploited for fear of racial controversy. As unhappy in her private life as she was frustrated in her film career, Dandridge died in 1965, a victim of drug abuse, prejudice, and her own great beauty.
Dandridge was born in Cleveland in 1922, the daughter of actress Ruby Dandridge and her estranged husband, Cyril. Both parents were of mixed racial origin, and young Dorothy inherited copper-colored skin and Caucasian features. From the age of three, Dorothy and her sister Vivian were performing with their mother at various church and social events in the Cleveland area. A talented singer, dancer, and actress, Ruby Dandridge was anxious to give her precocious girls a chance to escape the life of poverty and oppression they were otherwise nearly certain to find. The Dandridge girls were soon in demand as child prodigies of the stage, generally appearing under the auspices of black church associations.
Between the ages of five and eight, Dorothy Dandridge formed one half of The Wonder Kids, touring with her sister throughout the southern states on behalf of the National Baptist Convention. The little girls sang, danced, and performed humorous skits written by their mother and accompanied on the piano by their adopted "aunt," Eloise Mathews. The continual travel and stage work honed Dorothy's skills but did not provide her family with any regular income, and after a brief stop in Depression-era Chicago the Dandridge women moved out to Los Angeles to seek work in the film industry. A scout from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer noticed the youngsters, and they were hired for small roles in films such as the Marx Brothers' 1937 classic A Day at the Races.
By that time the girls had launched the Dandridge Sisters trio with a third singer named Etta Jones. After winning contests in the Los Angeles area they found steady work in New York at the famed Cotton Club, where Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington presided over the best jazz club in the country. There, 14-year-old Dandridge received her first important national exposure and was introduced to the premier black entertainers of the age, many of whom found her youthful beauty more than a little distracting. One of these was Harold Nicholas, who with his brother Fayard worked as the famous dance team of the Nicholas Brothers. Dandridge and Harold Nicholas began a four-year courtship that was often maintained at long distance as the two performers pursued their separate careers across the United States and Europe. They were married in 1942, and Dandridge became pregnant a short time thereafter.
Temporarily retired from the stage, Dandridge hoped to begin a life of a more settled nature with Nicholas and their daughter, Harolyn (nicknamed Lynn), but Dandridge's marriage turned out to be a disaster from its beginning. As she later candidly admitted in her autobiography Everything and Nothing, Dandridge was inexperienced sexually and guarded in her emotions, a combination Nicholas found to be excellent cause to return to his previous womanizing. Dandridge raised her daughter as she herself had been raised--without the help of a man--only to discover that Lynn was mentally retarded and would need special care for her entire life. Dandridge underwent a crisis that eventually resulted in divorce and a second career as an adult actress and singer.
Two years' study at the Actors' Laboratory in Los Angeles confirmed Dandridge's ambition to be a film actress in the tradition of earlier black stars such as Fredi Washington and Lena Horne. Like the latter, Dandridge made her way into film via her talents as a singer, which were greatly benefited at this time by a professional and romantic relationship with black composer Phil Moore. As a singer Dandridge had previously lacked range and passion, but under the guidance of Moore she developed her trademark style of sophisticated romance, concentrating on elegant renditions of torch songs by composers such as Moore and Cole Porter. She built a wardrobe of stunning costumes to accent her shapely figure and played at many of the more glamorous nightclubs around the country, generally, as she acknowledged in her memoirs, "singing Caucasian songs for Caucasian listeners."
It was Dandridge's appeal to white audiences that would prove both her good fortune and her undoing, for at the same time she found her career advancing, she discovered its fundamental obstacle: Dandridge's appeal was overwhelmingly sexual, but contemporary racial mores did not allow her to have relations on screen or off with white males. She was perceived as an exotic beauty by white audiences, a unique status that allowed her to tease--but not touch--whites. Indeed, it was not until Dandridge and John Justin were paired in the 1957 film Island in the Sun that a black woman in the arms of a white man had ever been recorded on a Hollywood film.
The contradiction inherent in her film personality did not hinder Dandridge's early singing career, however. As an isolated stage performer, she was free to adopt an erotic style without directly raising the issue of race, and in the early 1950s Dandridge was much in demand at clubs around the country. She was also much in demand by male admirers. Dandridge suffered through a long series of doomed relationships with a variety of men, mostly white, both famous and not so famous, none of whom offered her the security of marriage she seemed to have needed.
A 1951 Life magazine article cemented Dandridge's growing fame and fortune. Made relatively wealthy by her singing career, Dandridge at last broke into major motion pictures with a role as an African princess in 1951's Tarzan's Peril. The film was not regarded as great art, but male viewers were titillated by the sight of a half-naked Dandridge writhing in captivity. Two years later she was given a more complex role in Bright Road, the story of a teacher struggling to reach a difficult pupil with the help of a school principal, played by Harry Belafonte. The role was unique in Dandridge's career; the caring, thoughtful young teacher was far removed from her usual sex goddess persona, and it also offered clear proof that Dandridge had talent as an actress.
In 1954 Dandridge achieved the peak of her film career with a starring role in Carmen Jones, an all-black musical based on French composer Georges Bizet's opera Carmen. The film's director, Otto Preminger, needed a sultry, volatile woman for the title role; Dandridge was a possible choice, but Preminger thought her too inhibited and naturally elegant for the part. Dandridge returned for a second audition dressed as a whore--with an attitude to match. She landed both the part and the director.
Preminger and Dandridge remained lovers for a number of years, but more importantly Dandridge's performance as the combative Carmen earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. She did not win the Oscar, but as the first black ever to be nominated she appeared to have an unlimited future before her. Time magazine described Dandridge as "one of the outstanding dramatic actresses of the screen"--an accolade no white actress of comparable sex appeal had ever earned--and she made the cover of Life magazine as well. Carmen Jones was the high water mark of Dandridge's life, affirming the faith she had maintained in her own abilities and holding out the promise of future work with the widely respected Preminger, whom Dandridge hoped one day to marry.
Carmen Jones was an all-black movie, however, and true Hollywood stardom would require the acceptance of Dandridge in the same glamour roles expected of white actresses. These Dandridge would never be granted. Despite her undeniable talent and beauty, Dandridge was hemmed in by the unwritten law that blacks could not be romantically involved on screen. Where Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and a score of other white actresses spent their entire careers tempting white male viewers, Dandridge, who was generally considered the more skillful performer, found herself limited to increasingly rare "Negro films" or to the generic role of tragic mulatto in films with whites.
Thus, in 1959 Dandridge gave a strong performance as Bess in a film version of the black opera Porgy and Bess, winning the Golden Globe Award as best actress in a musical; while on the other side of the racial divide she found nothing more substantial than typecast roles in such mediocre fare as The Decks Ran Red (1958), Tamango (1959), and Malaga (1962). The 1957 production of Island in the Sun provided a somewhat meatier role for Dandridge, but it could only rehash the subject of interracial sex, not move beyond it. The most memorable aspect of all of these films was Dandridge herself, a true star restricted to roles that she knew to be unworthy of her potential and essentially dishonest about race.
Dandridge's performances in her later films are marked by the increasing strain she felt as a woman caught between two worlds. As her film career faltered, the actress's private life continued to be a source of endless grief, with one romance after another foundering on the rocks of racial difference. In 1959 she married her second husband, white nightclub owner John (better known as Jack) Denison. The marriage proved to be yet another disaster, however, and Dandridge later claimed in her autobiography that Denison had married her in the hope that she could support his troubled businesses.
If that were the case, Denison badly miscalculated, for Dandridge herself was soon in financial difficulties. Her income from film and nightclub work declined in the early sixties, and, even worse, she was persuaded to invest huge sums of money in Arizona oil wells. Little oil was found, and in March of 1963 Dandridge declared personal bankruptcy and lost everything she owned, including a house in the Hollywood hills. The marriage had ended a few months before, leaving Dandridge to face alone the prospect of poverty, middle age, and her failing career as an entertainer.
The situation was similar in some ways to that which she had overcome following the breakup of her first marriage, but a second comeback was far less likely at the age of 39. Dandridge nevertheless did her best to repair her screen career, signing a contract in 1965 to make two films with the Mexican producer Raul Fernandez; and in September of that year she was booked at a New York City nightclub for a two-week, $10,000 engagement. But this time the odds proved too great.
Dandridge had begun drinking heavily and taking drugs, including a prescribed anti-depressant called Tofranil. On September 8, 1965, she was found dead in her apartment in Los Angeles, apparently the victim of an overdose of Tofranil, although it remains unclear whether she intended to kill herself or even if Tofranil was capable of causing death in the amount taken. What is clear is that Dandridge for years had suffered from severe nervous disorders, the result in part of her predicament as a black female film star, and that in the last period of her life she had fallen victim to drug and alcohol abuse.
Though her films are now rarely watched, Dorothy Dandridge remains a unique example of thwarted talent and ill-starred beauty. Her career was made possible--and impossible--by post-war America's ambivalent racial attitudes, according to which a beautiful black woman could be acclaimed as an actress and at the same time denied the roles that would naturally have come to a white woman of comparable star quality. At her peak between the era of racial segregation and the later civil rights movement, Dandridge both acted and lived out the role of "tragic mulatto," suffering its consequences on screen and in her private life as well.
Awards
Academy Award (Oscar) nomination for best actress for role in Carmen Jones, 1954; Golden Globe Award for best actress, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for role in Porgy and Bess, 1959.
Further Reading
Books
- Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, Continuum, 1989.
- Dandridge, Dorothy, and Earl Conrad, Everything and Nothing, Abelard-Schuman, 1970.
- Mills, Earl, Dorothy Dandridge, Holloway House, 1989.
Periodicals- Ebony, June 1962; March 1966; September 1986.
- Essence, October 1984.
- Life, November 5, 1951; March 23, 1953; November 1, 1954.
- Time, February 4, 1952; May 2, 1955.
— Jonathan Martin
