Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1893 – October 26, 1952) was an American actress, singer-songwriter, and comedian. For her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first African American to win an Oscar. She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975, and in 2006, became the first black Oscar winner honored with a U.S. postage stamp. In 2010, she was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame.
In addition to acting, McDaniel recorded 16 blues sides between 1926 and 1929 and was a radio performer and television personality; she was the first black woman to sing on radio in the United States. Although she appeared in more than 300 films, she received on-screen credits for only 83. Her best known other major films are Alice Adams, In This Our Life, Since You Went Away, and Song of the South.
McDaniel experienced racism and racial segregation throughout her career, and as a result, she was unable to attend the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta because it was held in a whites-only theater. At the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, she sat at a segregated table at the side of the room. In 1952, McDaniel died of breast cancer. Her final wish, to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery, was denied because at the time of her death, the graveyard was segregated.
McDaniel, the youngest of 13 children, was born in 1893 to formerly enslaved parents in Wichita, Kansas. Her mother, Susan Holbert, was a singer of gospel music, and her father, Henry McDaniel, fought in the Civil War with the 12th United States Colored Troops.
In 1901, the family moved to Fort Collins, Colorado where McDaniel lived with her parents and three siblings in a house at 317 Cherry Street. She attended Franklin School. McDaniel's father Henry preached and sang at church. Local historians successfully appealed to have a plaque installed on the front of the house to recognize it as a historically significant location. The family did not live a long time in the city. They moved to Denver, Colorado. Hattie attended Denver East High School from 1908 to 1910. In 1910, she won a gold medal for reciting "Convict Joe", a Pre-Prohibition-era poem about the evils of alcohol, for a Women's Christian Temperance Union contest.
Her brother, Sam McDaniel, played the butler in the 1948 Three Stooges' short film Heavenly Daze. Her sister Etta McDaniel was also an actress.
McDaniel was a songwriter and performer and honed her skills while working with her brother Otis McDaniel's carnival company, a minstrel show. In 1914, while working for her brother's carnival company, McDaniel and her sister Etta Goff launched the McDaniel Sisters Company, an all-female minstrel show. After the death of her brother Otis in November 1916, Hattie and Etta continued their show, performing to full capacity crowds as The McDaniel Sisters and Their Merry Minstrel Maids in April and May 1917.
From 1920 to 1925, McDaniel appeared with Professor George Morrison's Melody Hounds, a Black touring ensemble. In the mid-1920s, she embarked on a radio career, singing with the Melody Hounds on station KOA in Denver. From 1926 to 1929, she recorded many of her songs for Okeh Records and Paramount Records in Chicago. McDaniel recorded two sides during a session with Hartzell "Tiny" Parham in the summer of 1926 for the Meritt label in Kansas City, Missouri.
After the stock market crashed in 1929, McDaniel could only find work as a washroom attendant at Sam Pick's Club Madrid near Milwaukee. Despite the Club Marid owner's reluctance to let her perform, she eventually convinced him to allow her to take the stage and soon thereafter became a regular performer.
In 1931, McDaniel moved to Los Angeles, where she joined her brother Sam, and sisters Etta and Orlena. When she could not get film work, she took jobs as a maid and laundress. Sam was working on a KNX radio program, The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, and was able to get his sister a spot. She performed on radio as "Hi-Hat Hattie", a bossy maid who often "forgets her place". Her show became popular, but her salary was so low that she had to keep working as a maid. She made her first film appearance in The Golden West (1932), in which she played a house servant or mammy. Her second appearance came in the highly successful Mae West film I'm No Angel (1933), in which she had a significant part. In 1934, McDaniel joined the Screen Actors Guild. She began to attract attention and landed larger film roles, which began to win her screen credits. Fox Film Corporation put her under contract to appear in The Little Colonel (1935), with Shirley Temple, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore.
Judge Priest (1934), directed by John Ford and starring Will Rogers, was the first film in which she played a major role. She had a leading part in the film and demonstrated her singing talent, including a duet with Rogers. Rogers helped guide McDaniel's performance. In 1935, McDaniel had prominent roles, as a slovenly maid in Alice Adams (RKO Pictures); a comic part as Jean Harlow's maid and traveling companion in China Seas (MGM) (also starring Clark Gable); and as the maid Isabella in Murder by Television, with Béla Lugosi. She appeared in the 1938 film Vivacious Lady, starring James Stewart and Ginger Rogers. McDaniel had a featured role as Queenie in the 1936 film Show Boat (Universal Pictures), starring Allan Jones and Irene Dunne, in which she sang a verse of Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man and she and Robeson sang "I Still Suits Me". After Show Boat, she had major roles in MGM's Saratoga (1937), starring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable; The Shopworn Angel (1938), with Margaret Sullavan; and The Mad Miss Manton (1938), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. She had a minor role in Nothing Sacred (1937), in which she played the "jilted wife".
McDaniel was a friend of many of Hollywood's most popular stars, including Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland, and Clark Gable.
She starred with de Havilland and Gable in Gone with the Wind (1939). Around this time, she was criticized by members of the Black community for the roles she accepted and for pursuing roles aggressively in the Hollywood system, instead of rocking the Hollywood boat by raising Black awareness. For example, in The Little Colonel (1935), the film reflected abusive and also romanticized stereotypes of slave and slaveowners roles in the Old South, something that McDaniel had to endure throughout her career. Her portrayal of Malena in RKO Pictures' Alice Adams was unique how Malena interacted with the Adams family. McDaniel's performance was described by reviewers as hilarious and highly comedic. Author Alvin Marill said of McDaniel's performance, "The highlight of the film—indeed one of the best-remembered moments in films of that era—is the dinner party, 'stolen' by Hattie McDaniel as the slatternly maid, Malena. She grumbles over the menu, battles balky dining room doors, fights a flopping maid's cap, chews gum, and shuffles her way through a series of unappetizing courses."
The competition to win the part of Mammy in Gone with the Wind was almost as fierce as that for Scarlett O'Hara. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to film producer David O. Selznick to ask that her own maid, Elizabeth McDuffie, be given the part. McDaniel did not think she would be chosen, because she had earned her reputation as a comic actress. One source claimed that Clark Gable recommended that the role be given to McDaniel; in any case, she went to her audition dressed in an authentic maid's uniform and won the part.
McDaniel said that the role was an "opportunity to glorify Negro womanhood … The brave efficient type of womanhood which … has built our race, paid for our elaborate houses of worship, and sustained our business, charitable and improvement organisations."
Loew's Grand Theater on Peachtree Street in Atlanta was selected by the studio as the site for the Friday, December 15, 1939, premiere of Gone with the Wind. Studio head David O. Selznick asked that McDaniel be permitted to attend, but MGM advised him not to, because of Georgia's segregation laws. Clark Gable threatened to boycott the Atlanta premiere unless McDaniel was allowed to attend, but McDaniel convinced him to attend anyway.