Lena Horne

Lena Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York. In her biography she stated that, on the day she was born, her father was in the midst of a card game trying to get money to pay the hospital costs. Her parents divorced while she was still a toddler. Her mother left later in order to find work as an actress and Lena was left in the care of her grandparents. When she was seven, her mother returned and the two traveled around the state which meant that Lena was enrolled in numerous schools. For a time she also attended schools in Florida, Georgia and Ohio. Later she returned to Brooklyn.

At 21 years of age, Lena made her first film, Duke Is Tops (1938).

She moved into cabaret performances in some part because her name had appeared in "Red Channels", a publication that circulated in the entertainment industry during the McCarthy "Red Scare" era that listed names of performers it considered "subversives". Her activities in the civil rights movement, beginning in the 1940s, and her longtime friendship with former Communist actor/singer Paul Robeson were also used against her.

It would be four more years before she appeared in another, Panama Hattie (1942), playing a singer in a nightclub. By now Lena had signed with MGM but, unfortunately for her, the pictures were shot so that her scenes could be cut out when they were shown in the South since most theaters in the South refused to show films that portrayed blacks in anything other than subservient roles to whites. Most movie studios did not want to take a chance on losing that particular source of revenue.

Lena did not want to appear in those kinds of stereotyped roles and who could blame her?In 1943, MGM loaned Lena to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black musical Stormy Weather (1943), which did extremely well at the box office. Her rendition of the title song became a major hit on the musical charts.

In 1943, she appeared in Cabin in the Sky (1943), regarded by many as one of the finest performances of her career. She played Georgia Brown opposite Ethel Waters and Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson in the all black production. Rumors were rampant that she and Waters just did not get along well, although there was never any mention of the source of the alleged friction. However, that was not the only feud on that picture. Other cast members sniped at one another and it was a wonder the film was made at all. Regardless of the hostilities, the movie was released to very good reviews from the ever tough critics. It went a long way in showing the depth of the talent that existed among black performers in Hollywood, especially Lena. Lena's musical career flourished, but her movie career stagnated.

Minor roles in films such as Boogie-Woogie Dream (1944), Words and Music (1948) and Mantan Messes Up (1946) did little to advance her film career, due mainly to the ingrained racist attitudes of the time. Even at the height of Lena's musical career, she was often denied rooms at the very hotels in which she performed because they would not let blacks stay there.

Sought the lead role in the controversial film Pinky (1949), about a black girl who passes for white. 20th Century-Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck decided to take the safe road and choose a white star who had box-office appeal and picked Jeanne Crain. "Pinky", which was a slang term for a light-skinned black, won Crain her only Oscar nomination.

She was branded a "Communist sympathizer" by many right-wing conservatives because of her association with Paul Robeson and her progressive political beliefs (which led her to be blacklisted in the 1950s).

While at MGM, her appearances in movies were shot so that they could be cut easily from the film. This was because MGM feared audiences of the day--but especially in the South--would not accept a beautiful black woman in romantic, non-menial roles. Many in the business believed that this was the main reason she lost out on playing the mulatto "Julie" in MGM's remake of Show Boat (1951). Ironically, the role was played by one of Lena's close off-screen friends, Ava Gardner, who practiced for it by singing to Horne's recordings of the songs, and Lena had already appeared in the "Show Boat" segment of Till The Clouds Roll By (1946), in which she appeared as "Julie" singing "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" (which was, as all her MGM appearances, shot in such a way that it could be easily edited out of the film). Another irony is that she had been invited by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II themselves to play "Julie" in the 1946 Broadway revival of "Show Boat", but had had to refuse because MGM would not release her from her contract.

While on a performance tour in England in July 1954 she was offered a leading role in a movie to be filmed in England, on the life of jazz and ragtime composer and pianist Jelly Roll Morton. The movie was ultimately never made.

After Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), Lena left films to concentrate on music and the stage.

She was a lifelong liberal Democrat who was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on anti-lynching laws and during the John F. Kennedy administration she was a frequent guest at the White House.

She returned in 1969 as Claire Quintana in Death of a Gunfighter (1969).

Nine years later, she returned to the screen again in the all black musical The Wiz (1978) where she played Glinda the Good Witch.

Received an honorary doctorate from Howard University in 1980.

Received a Special Tony Award in 1982 for "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music". She had previously been nominated for Broadway's 1958 Tony Award as Best Actress (Musical) for "Jamaica".

Lena quit school when she was 14 and got her first stage job at 16 dancing and later singing at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem, a renowned theater in which black performers played before white audiences immortalized in The Cotton Club (1984)). She was in good hands at the club, especially when people such as Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington took her under their wings and helped her over the rough spots. Before long, her talent resulted in her playing before packed houses. If Lena had never made a movie, her music career would have been enough to have ensured her legendary status in the entertainment industry, but films were icing on the cake. After she made an appearance on Broadway, Hollywood came calling.

She was the mother of journalist and author Gail Lumet Buckley, whose articles have appeared in Vogue Magazine (USA) and The Los Angeles Times (CA, USA); Buckley has researched and authored two books "The Hornes: An American Family" (New American Library, 1986) and "American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm" (Random House, 2001).

Received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1989.

Inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1991.

Leslie Uggams is scheduled to portray her in a musical production "Stormy Weather" at the Pasadena Playhouse (California) starting January 2009.

She was posthumously awarded a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars on November 26, 2012.

Pictured on a nondenominated USA commemorative postage stamp in the Black Heritage series, issued 30 January 2018. Price on day of issue was 50¢.

On August 6, 2019, she was honored with a day of her film work during the Turner Classic Movies Summer Under the Stars.