Carroll, Diahann

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Carroll, Diahann

Sex:  Female

Born:  Bronx, New York, United States
17 July 1935

Activity/Profession:  Popular Singer, Stage / Screen Actor, Television Actor, Radio / Television Personality

(b. 17 July 1935),
singer, actor.

Diahann Carroll was only six when she joined the Tiny Tots choir at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. Her life appears to have been a nonstop rollercoaster ride ever since. As she said in Diahann: An Autobiography, “All I ever wanted to do was sing. What happened was more.”

Carroll grew up in Harlem, New York, although she was born in the Bronx as Carol Diann Johnson. Her parents were John and Mabel Faulk Johnson. She has one sister, Lydia, thirteen years younger. Her father was a subway conductor, and her mother, who trained as a nurse, stayed at home to raise her daughters. The household, while not wealthy, was solidly middle class.

Diahann Carroll, shown here in her role as a mysterious beauty in the television series Dynasty.

Photofest; ABC Photograph

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At the age of ten, Carroll won a music scholarship through an organization affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera. At fourteen, she got her first modeling job with Ebony magazine, and, by the age of sixteen, she had changed her name and won first prize on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. Carroll attended New York University for part of one semester but left school after she won another television talent show, Chance of a Lifetime. In addition to a $3,000 prize, the young singer won the opportunity to perform for a week at the famous Latin Quarter nightclub.

In 1954, Carroll made her film debut in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones. That same year, she made her Broadway debut as Ottilie in House of Flowers, for which she received a Tony nomination. Her first album, Diahann Carroll Sings Harold Arlen Songs, was released in 1957, and she began to become nationally known as a chanteuse—beautiful, glamorous, sophisticated, and sexy. Her next films were Porgy and Bess (1959), Paris Blues (1961), and Goodbye Again (1961). During the same period she moved into dramatic television, appearing in Peter Gunn and receiving a 1962 Emmy nomination for a guest performance on Naked City.

In 1962 Carroll also appeared on Broadway in Richard Rodgers's No Strings. In a role written specifically for her, Carroll played an elegant, high-fashion model in love with a white novelist. The play was an enormous success, and Carroll won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. (She tied with Anna Maria Alberghetti, who also won for Carnival!) In the following years, Carroll became a Las Vegas headliner and one of the few African Americans to appear regularly on variety television shows, including The Tonight Show and The Carol Burnett Show. She returned to feature films with Hurry Sundown (1967) and The Split (1968), but neither was a success. She followed these films with her best-known and most controversial role, the title character in the television series Julia.

Julia was a situation comedy about a single mother who was a young, middle-class nurse and whose husband had died in Vietnam. The show was the first since Beulah to feature a black actor in the title role and the first in history to feature a professional black woman. One month after its first airing, it was in the top ten of the Neilsen ratings. Carroll was nominated for an Emmy and won a Golden Globe Award after the first season. She was nominated for another Golden Globe for the second season.

Despite all this good news, Julia was a difficult experience for Carroll. It aired at the height of the 1960s protest movements. Both the show and Carroll herself were criticized harshly because Julia did not deal realistically with racial issues, the Vietnam War, or black poverty. The character was supposed to be a single, working mother, yet—in true Hollywood fashion and fitting with Carroll's glamorous persona—she and her house were outfitted beautifully. While the 1968 season also premiered both The Mod Squad and The Outsiders, which presented more race-conscious views of America, it seems only fair to compare Julia with other shows in its same genre. For example, when examined next to Bewitched or The Beverly Hillbillies, Julia does not seem particularly egregious. In 1998, Carroll put her own perspective on the show:

"I thought in the midst of the struggle that a positive statement could not hurt and that it was certainly something that I wanted all children to see …. I think my background was very close to Julia, and I think that the segment of the population who also had middle-class parents felt a closeness to Julia, and they were happy to see her there."

(20/20 interview with Connie Chung)

However, at the time, the turmoil exhausted Carroll. After the second season, she asked to be released from her contract and returned to singing.

Four years later, Carroll made up for Julia and again surprised everybody with her performance in the film Claudine (1974). The antithesis of Julia, Claudine was a poor, single mother of six who worked as a domestic and lived in Harlem. Reflecting on the experience of filming that movie, Carroll wrote, “I couldn't wait to put aside the couture gowns and to work without glamorous make-up …. I wanted to let my talent out, to expose it, to test it.” Obviously she succeeded. Carroll was nominated for an Academy Award and received an NAACP Image Award for her performance. The following year she was inducted into the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame.

After Claudine, Carroll's career continued to reflect her diverse talents. She starred in her own summer variety series, The Diahann Carroll Show, and continued to sing in nightclubs. She also appeared on television and in movies, including such productions as Roots: The Next Generations (Episode 6, 1978), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979), and Sister, Sister (1982), for which she received particularly glowing reviews. In 1982, she made history again when she replaced Elizabeth Ashley in the Broadway production of Agnes of God, thus becoming the first black woman to replace a white woman in a leading role. Two years later, she achieved another first by playing, in her own words, “the first black bitch on television” when she joined the cast of the nighttime soap opera Dynasty. As Dominique Deveraux, Carroll was the ultimate sophisticated villainess. Her entrance into the show boosted its ratings, and she stayed on until 1987.

Two years after leaving Dynasty, Carroll was nominated for another Emmy Award, for her performance on A Different World. She also returned to feature films with roles in The Five Heartbeats (1991) and From the Dead of Night (1992). Busy throughout the 1990s, she was on Lonesome Dove: The Series (1994) on television and played Nora Desmond in the Canadian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard (1995–1996). In 1996, she was awarded a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. The following year she appeared in Kasi Lemmon's breakaway film success Eve's Bayou and launched her own fashion line sold through the JC Penny Company.

In 1998 Carroll was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a successful lumpectomy and radiation treatments, she was still cancer free in 2004. The experience led her to adjust her priorities. As she told Francine Russo of Time magazine, “In my business, there's so much emphasis on beauty and glamour and having the perfect body. It was not until a life-altering event threatened my looks that I realized how shallow this is.” She went on later in the article to remark, “Since my cancer, I have learned that reaching out to others—friends, my child, other cancer patients—is more fulfilling than the self-centered life I had lived.”

Judging from her body of work since 1998, cancer may have made Carroll re-evaluate her priorities, but it didn't slow her down. Among other activities, in 1998 and 1999 she toured the country with the immensely successful concert tour of Almost Like Being in Love—The Lerner and Loewe Songbook and appeared opposite Ruby Dee in the television movie Having Our Say. In 2000 she was in The Courage to Love, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, and Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story. In 2002 she returned to the stage, joining Phylicia Rashad in the play Blue.

In addition to well-publicized and sometimes turbulent relationships with Sidney Poitier and David Frost, Carroll has been married four times: to Monte Kay in 1956, to Freddie Glusman in 1973, to Robert DeLeon in 1975, and to Vic Damone in 1987. DeLeon died in a car accident in 1977 and all the other marriages ended in divorce. Her one daughter is Suzanne Patricia Ottilie Kay.

Called one of the most beautiful women in the world and listed on the Ten International Best Dressed List, Diahann Carroll has proven herself to be far more than a “bronze Barbie doll,” as she was once called. Through talent and perseverance, she has helped change the perception of what a black woman is and can be.

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