Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,067

This is the grave of Diahann Carroll.

Born in 1935 in The Bronx, Carol Diann Johnson was the daughter of a subway worker and a nurse, so pretty firmly in the Black middle class of that place and time. She grew up in Harlem and showed interests in the arts immediately. She and Billy Dee Williams were classmates at the Music and Art High School on the Upper West Side. Her parents were really supportive of her goals and she enjoying singing, dancing, acting, and modeling. She had the look for the latter and started modeling professionally at the age of 15, particularly for Ebony. She went to NYU for college, but wasn’t a very serious student. It was just something to do until she could create a professional life for herself, which she did pretty early and so she dropped out.

That big break was getting a singing appearance on a TV game show in 1954, where she sang the hell out of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Why Was I Born?” There was a nice cash prize there, but more importantly got her nightclub gigs in the city. Otto Preminger immediately saw her talent and cast her in a supporting role in Carmen Jones, starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, playing the latter’s best friend. By this time, she had switched her name around to the more memorable Diahann Carroll.

In no time at all, Carroll was one of the leading Black stars of stage and screen. That limited her roles in a still pretty racist entertainment industry, but she worked consistently and in quality projects, both on the stage and screen. She got the role of Clara when Preminger decided to make another movie starring Black actors, adapting George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and again starring Belafonte and Preminger. However, he chose to dub her voice in the end. Martin Ritt cast her in another important supporting role in his 1961 film Paris Blues, starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Sydney Poitier.

Caroll also had an excellent stage career. She made her Broadway debut in 1954, working in House of Flowers, right at the start of her rise. She soon got better roles. In 1962, she was cast in No Strings, the new Richard Rodgers musical. Not only did she get the lead, but she won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, the first Black person to win that award. It would hardly be the only time she would be the first Black woman to do something big.

The show itself is not particularly remembered, but Carroll pioneered a new kind of role for a Black woman on TV when she was cast in the lead of Julia, which started in 1968. This was the show in TV history to cast a Black woman in a major role where she was not a maid or some other kind of subservient figure that fit into stereotypes. Julia ran from 1968-71 and starred Carroll and Lloyd Nolan. It was a doctor show. Carroll played a nurse whose husband is killed in Vietnam (can you imagine a major network show having a plot that revolved around a dead veteran in the 21st century? Instead, the networks provided torture porn like 24) and she has to go to work to support her child. She was given romantic interests in the show too, though of course not interracial ones. It would be The Jeffersons I think that would introduce interracial relationships to network TV, with Sherman Helmsley joking about it all the way. So the show cast Fred Williamson and Paul Winfield to play her potential new partners. I don’t know if anyone watches this show today–I have never seen an episode of it-but Carroll won a Golden Globe for her work in it.

Carroll had a second big TV role in the 80s, when she played the ridiculously named Dominique Deveraux in Dynasty between 1984 and 1987, the illegitimate half-sister of Blake Carrington, played of course by John Forsythe. Billy Dee Williams played her husband. In fact, they would appear together repeatedly in productions through their careers, including film, TV, and the stage. She would appear frequently on TV in her later years. Who wouldn’t want a legend to show up for a guest appearance or two? So she ended up on Gray’s Anatomy and A Different World, among many other shows. She had a full season on the latter and was nominated for a Golden Globe for that too, her third. She also frequently appeared in musicals, TV movies, all kinds of things in these years.

Carroll and Williams (of course) were in Lonesome Dove: The Series. She had a good part in the film version of The Five Heartbeats. She also did a stage version of Sunset Boulevard in 1995, where she played the Norma Desmond character. On top of all this, she recorded quite a few albums, mostly in the 60s and 70s. I have not heard them.

Of course, Carroll was also a huge star and a hero in the Black community. Although her father refused to attend her first wedding, to the music producer Monte Kay, Adam Clayton Powell was the presiding minister and there was no one bigger in New York than Powell. Not long after she got married, she had an affair with Poitier and they would eventually have nearly a decade together, though not before he hemmed and hawed about leading his wife like she had left Kay. Later, Carroll dated David Frost, who she was engaged to in the early 70s, and then she married Vic Damone, her last husband. They were married between 1987 and 1996. In 1997, Carroll was diagnosed with breast cancer. She beat it and then used her significant fame to do a lot of fundraising on the issue. And in fact, that’s how she spent a lot of her later decades–being famous and using that fame to do charity work.

The last couple of years of her life, Carroll started suffering from a bit of dementia, but she died mostly of just being old, in 2019, at the age of 84.

Diahann Carroll is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people Carroll worked with, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Dorothy Dandridge is in Glendale, California and Lloyd Nolan is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.