Lena Horne Died
The first black performer who had a extended term contract using a major Hollywood studio and achieved international fame being a singer Lena Horne died. On May 9, 2010 she dies. Based on NY Times, Lena Horne died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York.
She was 92 and lived in Manhattan. Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley. Ms. Horne may have become a key film star, but she was born 50 many years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, despite the fact that she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black youngsters had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”
Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical right after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could very easily be snipped from the movie when it played inside the South, exactly where the thought of an African-American performer in something but a subservient part in the movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.
“The only time I ever said a word to one more actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson inside a tiny segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” integrated in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a motion picture about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne mentioned in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.
So far, there’s no immediate statement when Lena Horne funeral will probably be held.
