William Warfield

William Warfield was a concert baritone singer, who gave his recital debut in New York's Town Hall in 1950. He was then quickly invited by the Australian Broadcast Corporation to tour Australia for thirty-five concerts.

As an actor, he appeared in only two motion pictures, one of them being his memorable performance as Joe in the 1951 version of Show Boat (1951), filmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the other as a tugboat captain in "Old Explorers".

Was supposed to have played Jim in a 1952 MGM Technicolor musical version of "Huckleberry Finn", with songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, but the project was shelved. Dean Stockwell was supposed to have played Huck, with Gene Kelly and Danny Kaye as the two con men. Some of the songs were later used in MGM's 1960 non-musical Technicolor remake of the novel, which featured an entirely different cast from the proposed 1952 version.

He became almost as identified with the song "Ol' Man River" as Paul Robeson had a generation earlier, and starred with Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway in a European tour of Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess". This "Porgy and Bess" played to sold-out houses all over Europe. It was performed to huge acclaim in Russia during the early days of the Cold War, and was the first American opera production to ever play Milan's La Scala Opera House. It wound up its tour on Broadway in 1953 (without Warfield, who was forced to drop out immediately prior because of earlier recording commitments). In contrast to the original 1935 production of the opera, it received rave reviews from the New York critics. It ran eight months on Broadway, one month less than the 1942 revival, but nevertheless rang up more performances - 305 - than any other production of "Porgy and Bess" to ever play in New York, at least until 2006. As it happened, it played at the Ziegfeld, the theatre at which the original 1927 production of "Show Boat" and its 1946 revival both played.

In 1955, he was chosen by the Philadelphia Orchestra as their official soloist on the orchestra's first tour of Europe.

He and Miss Price were legally separated in 1958, but did not receive a divorce decree until 1972.

During the 1980s was chair of vocal music for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's School of Music.