Fredi Washington

She moved to New York at the age of 16 and started her career as a chorus girl two years later at the Alabam Club. She spent four years (1922-1926) in the landmark play "Shuffle Along".

Billed as "Edith Warren" in the Broadway show "Black Boy" in 1926 starring Paul Robeson. It was here that the light-skinned, green-eyed beauty first played her archetypal half caste role in which the character tries to pass for white. According to Laura Wagner's article on Fredi, she met Paul Robeson and began an on-and-off again relationship with Robeson that lasted two decades.

Fredi Washington was a pioneering African-American actress whose fair skin and green eyes often were impediments to her showing her extraordinary acting skills. Her talent was often overlooked because of people's obsession with her race and color. In the few films in which she acted her enormous talent as an actress couldn't be hidden. Her first film performance was with Duke Ellington in a musical short, Black and Tan Fantasy (1929), as a dancer. In Hollywood she was urged to "pass" for fully white by studio heads, who said they would make her a bigger star than Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett and Greta Garbo. Fredi refused.

The mid-1930s were her most productive film years playing the lead in The Emperor Jones (1933) opposite Paul Robeson, the lead in the voodoo drama Ouanga (1936) and, her most famous role, Peola Johnson, who turns against her black mother (Louise Beavers) in an effort to pass for white, in the Claudette Colbert starrer Imitation of Life (1934).

Played the lead opposite Paul Robeson in the Broadway play "Black Boy" under the (then) stage name of Edith Warren. She later worked with Robeson again in The Emperor Jones (1933), in which her skin was darkened with makeup for fear that audiences might think Robeson was actually filming love scenes with a white woman.

Her best-known role was as the original Peola, in the controversial film Imitation of Life (1934).

Turning down a contract at Universal for fear of being typed in servile roles, she later played a black mother raising a white child in the excellent film One Mile from Heaven (1937).

As a co-founder of the Negro Actors Guild, the Guild's officers at the time included Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was married to her sister Isabel Washington. Later Fredi was editor and columnist for "The People's Voice", a weekly paper founded by Powell in 1938. She wrote the regular features "Headlines and Footlights" And "Fredi Speaks".

In the 1940s and early 1950s, she actively participated in the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts.

A well-spoken advocate on equal rights, from 1942-1948 she was an editor and columnist for The People's Voice, a weekly newspaper started by Baptist minter-cum-politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the husband of Fredi's sister Isabel. She also was involved in the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts.

First husband was Lawrence Brown, a trombonist in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Following their divorce in 1951 she married Connecticut dentist Hugh Anthony Bell, and retired. She worked at the Stamford branch of Bloomingdale's from 1954 to 1980.