Dorothy Dandridge, born in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 9, 1922, became the first Black woman nominated for the Academy Award for best actress, and she got there in a musical whose songs were sung by somebody else.
The film was Carmen Jones, Otto Preminger’s 1954 screen version of the Broadway show that moved Bizet’s opera to a World War II-era Black American setting, with an all-Black cast. Dandridge had spent years headlining nightclubs. The studio still wanted an operatic sound, so mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne recorded Carmen’s numbers and Dandridge acted to them.
The Academy’s own record of its 27th awards night shows how far the performance carried her. On Wednesday, March 30, 1955, at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, the best actress category held five names (the Academy lists the nominees alphabetically; the order here is ours):
- Grace Kelly in The Country Girl, the winner
- Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina
- Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones
- Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession
- Judy Garland in A Star Is Born
Kelly went home with the statuette. Dandridge, 32 that night, went home as the first African American ever named in a leading-role category. Her film picked up a second nomination, for the scoring of a musical picture, and she walked on stage as a presenter to hand the film editing award to Gene Milford for On the Waterfront.
A working performer from the age of five
None of it came quickly. Her mother, Ruby Dandridge, an entertainer who later found radio and screen work in Los Angeles, built a song-and-dance act around Dorothy and her sister Vivian and billed them as the Wonder Children. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, kept by Case Western Reserve University, says Dorothy was on stage at five and that the family left Ohio for Los Angeles when she was nine.
In the 1930s the sisters joined a friend, Etta Jones, as the Dandridge Sisters and played New York’s Cotton Club. Hollywood was slower to notice. The filmography in her open-encyclopedia biography lists more than two dozen screen appearances before 1953, many of them uncredited: a maid, a dancer, a band singer.
Her first lead came that year as a schoolteacher in Bright Road, opposite Harry Belafonte. Biographical accounts say the part nearly cost her the next one. Preminger reportedly pictured the demure teacher in a smaller role in Carmen Jones, and Dandridge changed his mind by turning up at his office styled as Carmen.
What the nomination did and did not change
The spring of 1955 looked like a launch. On April 11, less than two weeks after the ceremony, she became the first Black performer to open at the Empire Room of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
The film roles did not follow at the same speed. Her next picture did not reach theaters until 1957, three years after Carmen Jones. She played Bess opposite Sidney Poitier in Porgy and Bess in 1959, which brought a Golden Globe nomination, and made her last completed film soon after. She died in West Hollywood on September 8, 1965, at 42.
The 47-year wait, counted out
Dandridge’s nomination stood as the high-water mark for a long time, and the arithmetic is simple. Carmen Jones is a 1954 film. The first Black woman to win best actress, Halle Berry, won for Monster’s Ball, a 2001 film. That is 2001 minus 1954, or 47 years between the two performances.
The two women share more than a line in the record books. Berry was also born in Cleveland, and before her own win she played Dandridge in the 1999 television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Accepting her Oscar, she named Dandridge alongside Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll.
One note for anyone checking the date: the Cleveland encyclopedia prints her birth year as 1923, while the other reference works we read give 1922. On the 1922 date, Monday is the 104th anniversary of her birth (2026 minus 1922).
Carmen Jones itself opened on October 28, 1954, which makes the film 72 years old as of 12 days ago.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: Dorothy Dandridge
- Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Case Western Reserve University): Dandridge, Dorothy
Image: Christian Dionne, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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