Diahann Carroll

• Born: July 17, 1935
• Birthplace: Bronx, New York
• Died: October 4, 2019
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Actor and singer

An international celebrity known for her beauty and glamour, Carroll overcame barriers of race and gender in the entertainment industry, a troubled personal life, and a diagnosis of breast cancer, and continued to act and sing well into her seventies.

Early Life

Diahann Carroll (di-AN KA-rohl) was born Carol Diann Johnson on July 17, 1935. She grew up in Harlem, New York, the older daughter of John Johnson and Mabel Faulk Johnson. Her parents had moved from the South to New York in search of a better life. Although their formal education was limited to high school, John and Mabel Johnson were thrifty and ambitious. John was a subway conductor, and when Carroll was born, Mabel Johnson became a stay-at-home mother. When Carroll was fourteen, the Johnsons had another daughter, Lydia. By the time Carroll entered elementary school, the family had attained a comfortable, middle-class life. Carroll was a model student, talented performer, and an adored, pampered, and protected child.

In her autobiography, Carroll recalled feeling different from most of her classmates at her Harlem junior high school because her parents could afford to dress her well and provide her with opportunities to perform. At a young age, Carroll was a soloist with the choir at Abyssinian Baptist Church. At age ten, she won a scholarship to study at the Metropolitan Opera. In her teens, she modeled for Ebony and Sepia magazines and was accepted to attend New York’s High School for the Arts. Before she graduated, she had secured a singing engagement on a popular radio show, The Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts. By the end of high school, Carroll was entertaining thoughts of a career as a performer.

To please her parents, Carroll enrolled at New York University, but she dropped out after securing a singing engagement in a New York nightclub. By nineteen, she had changed her name to Diahann Carroll and was on her way to Hollywood to audition for her first film.

Life’s Work

Carroll’s first film role was in the most successful all-black film of its time, Carmen Jones (1954). Carroll realized, however, that large film roles for black actors would be few and far between. In the next fifteen years, she played supporting and leading characters in only eight films. Among them was Paris Blues (1961), shot in Paris with Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward. Playing Connie Lampson, a schoolteacher vacationing in Paris, Carroll had landed her first nonsinging dramatic role. She later appeared in Hurry Sundown (1967), The Split (1968), and as the title character in Claudine (1974), for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Carroll returned to New York after Carmen Jones and was cast as the ingénue in the Broadway play House of Flowers. In 1962, she starred in Richard Rodgers’s musical No Strings, the first Broadway production to feature an interracial relationship. Carroll won a Tony Award for her performance. During her career, she would return to the stage in other race barrier-breaking roles, including as the psychiatrist in Agnes of God (1983) and as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1995). In between stage and in film work, Carroll maintained her singing career. She played big-city venues and nightclubs, billing herself as a sophisticated chanteuse. Popular with audiences, she still experienced discrimination on and offstage. In 1956, she married Monte Kay, a white Jewish man with whom she had a daughter, Suzanne. This was the first of several marriages for the driven professional who admitted she often put her career ahead of family life.

That career took a significant turn when the television sitcom Julia debuted in 1968. Cast as the title character, a single mother and middle-class professional living in an integrated suburb, Carroll became the first African American woman to star in her own sitcom. She continued to appear on television in the decades that followed, on variety shows and in guest appearances. In 1985, at the age of fifty, Carroll won another breakthrough role, joining the popular (and predominantly white) nighttime soap opera Dynasty as Dominique Deveraux. Carroll continued to act into the 2000’s with recurring roles on Soul Food (2003–04), Grey’s Anatomy (2006–07), and White Collar (2009–14). In 2016, she appeared in the Canadian biographical crime film The Masked Saint.

Although her career afforded Carroll a glamorous lifestyle, her personal life was sometimes troubled. She had four unsuccessful marriages and became estranged from her daughter. In 1997, she developed breast cancer and underwent radiation therapy. Determined to make the best of the situation, Carroll launched a line of signature fashions and wigs. She also became a spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society and the Wellness Community. She reconciled with her daughter and found enjoyment in family life when she became a grandmother. In the early twenty-first century, she toured with a one-woman show and published her second autobiography. On October 4, 2019, Carroll died at the age of eighty-four due to complications from breast cancer.

Significance

Carroll’s survival in the entertainment business is legend. The aspirations and resources of her middle-class family provided Carroll with the confidence, strong work ethic, and opportunities to follow her ambition. These qualities also helped her pioneer and survive in an industry that was not always accepting of African Americans or women in other than narrow, often stereotyped roles. Carroll was a race pioneer on Broadway, in films, and on television. She received numerous prestigious awards, including a Tony, a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Still glamorous and employable into her seventies, Carroll has inspired and helped increase opportunities for other African American actors.

Bibliography

Archive of American Television. “Diahann Carroll.” Interview by Henry Collins. March 3, 1998. http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/diahann -carroll. Eight-part video interview covers the sweep of Carroll’s career. Web site also includes links to information about Carroll’s television roles and a full episode of Dynasty.

Bogle, Donald. Brown Sugar: Over One Hundred Years of America’s Black Female Superstars. New York: Continuum, 2007. Carroll is among the subjects of this popular history of black female entertainers from Ma Rainey to Beyoncé Knowles.

Carroll, Diahann. The Legs Are the Last to Go. New York: Amistad, 2008. Carroll reflects on her career, life, and loves from the perspective of a woman in her seventies.

Dreher, Kwakiutl L. “Diahann Carroll: The Recuperation of Black Widow-Single Mother/Womanhood.” In Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing Autobiography. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Discusses Carroll’s dispute with Harry Belafonte over Julia: Belafonte urged her to decline the role because he saw the show as minimizing the importance of black men in black families; Carroll saw value in portraying a realistic middle-class African American family. The author examines how the show challenged established perceptions of race and family.

Fox, Margalit. "Diahann Carroll, Actress Who Broke Barriers With ‘Julia,’ Dies at 84." The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/arts/television/diahann-carroll-dead.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2020.