Dorothy Jean Dandridge (November 9, 1922 – September 8, 1965) was an American actress and singer. She was the first African American to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Carmen Jones (1954), a performance which also earned her a nomination for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress. Dandridge had also performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. During her early career, she performed as a part of the Wonder Children, later the Dandridge Sisters, and appeared in a succession of films, usually in uncredited roles.
In 1959, Dandridge was nominated for both a Golden Globe Award and a Laurel Award for Porgy and Bess. She was the subject of the 1999 biographical film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, with Halle Berry portraying her. In 1983, she was recognized, posthumously, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Dandridge was married and divorced twice, first to dancer Harold Nicholas (the father of her daughter, Harolyn Suzanne) and then to hotel owner Jack Denison. Dandridge died in 1965 at the age of 42.
Dorothy Jean Dandridge was born in 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio to entertainer Ruby (née Butler) and Cyril Dandridge. Her father was a cabinetmaker and Baptist minister. Her parents separated before her birth.
Ruby created a song-and-dance act for her two young daughters, Vivian and Dorothy, under the name The Wonder Children. The act was managed by her lover, Geneva Williams. Williams was said to have had a bad temper and to have cruelly disciplined the children. The sisters toured the Southern United States almost nonstop for five years (rarely attending school), while Ruby worked and performed in Cleveland.
During the Great Depression, work virtually dried up for the Dandridges, as it did for many Chitlin' Circuit performers. Ruby moved her family to Hollywood, California, where she found steady work on radio and film in small domestic-servant parts. After that relocation, in 1930, Dorothy attended McKinley Junior High School in Pasadena.
The Wonder Children were renamed The Dandridge Sisters in 1934. Dandridge and her sister were teamed with dance schoolmate Etta Jones.
The Dandridge Sisters continued strong for several years, and they were booked in several high-profile New York nightclubs, including the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater.
Dorothy Dandridge first appeared on screen at the age of 12, doubling for one of The Cabin Kids in the Bing Crosby-W. C. Fields musical comedy Mississippi (1935). That same year, when The Cabin Kids made a guest appearance in the Our Gang comedy short Teacher's Beau, Dandridge also appeared in a small role. As part of The Dandridge Sisters, she also appeared in The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1936) with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, A Day at the Races with the Marx Brothers, and It Can't Last Forever (both 1937) with the Jackson Brothers. Although these appearances were relatively minor, Dandridge continued to earn recognition through her nightclub performances nationwide.
Dandridge's first credited film role was in Four Shall Die (1940). The race film cast her as a murderer and did little for her film career. Because of her rejection of stereotypical black roles, she had limited options for film roles. She had small roles in Lady from Louisiana with John Wayne and Sundown with Gene Tierney, both in 1941.
Success as a specialty performer
Dandridge appeared as part of the specialty number "Chattanooga Choo Choo" in the hit 1941 musical Sun Valley Serenade for 20th Century Fox. The film marked the first time she performed with the Nicholas Brothers.
In addition to her screen appearances, Dandridge appeared in 10 Soundies – three-minute movie musicals that were displayed on coin-operated-projector jukeboxes -- during 1941 and 1942. She appeared as a dancer in the Mills Brothers' "Paper Doll" but usually appeared as a singer in such mini-musicals as "Swing for Your Supper", "A Zoot Suit (With a Reet Pleat)", "Cow-Cow Boogie", and "Yes, Indeed!" These films showcased her musical and acting talents, as well as her attractive face and figure. Dorothy Dandridge and another movie newcomer, Gale Storm, became Soundies' first stars.
In 1941 Dandridge was a featured performer in Duke Ellington’s musical review “Jump for Joy.” She appeared occasionally in films and on the stage throughout the rest of the 1940s and performed as a band singer in films with Count Basie in Hit Parade of 1943 and with Louis Armstrong in Atlantic City (1944) and Pillow to Post (1945). In 1944, Dandridge starred on stage in "Sweet 'N Hot", a musical held at the Mayan theatre in Los Angeles and produced by Leon Hefflin Sr., which played nightly for 11 weeks. In 1951, Dandridge appeared as Melmendi, Queen of the Ashuba in Tarzan's Peril, starring Lex Barker and Virginia Huston. When the Motion Picture Production Code objected to the film's "blunt sexuality", Dandridge received considerable attention for wearing what was considered "provocatively revealing" clothing. The continuing publicity buzz surrounding Dandridge's wardrobe got her featured on the April 1951 cover of Ebony. The same year, she had an ingenue role in Columbia Pictures' dramatization of the exhibition basketball team, The Harlem Globetrotters.
In May 1951, Dandridge had a spectacular opening at the Mocambo nightclub in West Hollywood, the biggest in its history. after assiduous coaching and decisions on style with pianist Phil Moore. This success seemed a new turn to her career, and she appeared in New York and at Café de Paris in London with equal success. In a return engagement at the Mocambo in December 1952, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio agent saw Dandridge and recommended to production chief Dore Schary that she might make an appearance as a club singer, in her own name, in Remains to Be Seen, a film already in production. Her acquaintance with Dore Schary resulted in his casting Dandridge as Jane Richards in Bright Road—her first starring role, in which she expressed herself as a "wonderful, emotional actress"—which the trailer promoted. The film, which centered on a teacher's struggles to reach a troubled student, marked the first time Dandridge appeared in a film opposite Harry Belafonte. She continued her performances in nightclubs and appeared on multiple early television variety shows, including Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town.
Carmen Jones and 20th Century Fox
In 1953, a talent search was conducted as 20th Century Fox began the process of casting an all-black musical film adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein II's 1943 Broadway musical Carmen Jones. This production had updated Georges Bizet's opera Carmen to a World War II-era, African-American setting. Dandridge had most recently played a lead as a school teacher in Bright Road, and director and writer Otto Preminger couldn't visualize Dandridge as the classic femme fatale in Carmen Jones (1954). He thought that she would be suited for the smaller role, Cindy Lou. Dandridge, who had dressed appropriately for the screen test of Bright Road to suit the demure teacher she had portrayed in that movie, worked with Max Factor makeup artists to convey the look and character of the earthy Carmen for a meeting with Preminger in his office. The effect -- combined with a viewing of her freer, looser performance in the 1941 Soundie "Easy Street" -- convinced Preminger that Dandridge was right for the title role.
The remainder of the cast was completed with Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll, Madame Sul-Te-Wan (uncredited), Olga James, and Joe Adams.