Singer, actor, producer and activist Harry Belafonte died of congestive heart failure at his Manhattan home. He was 96 at the time.
He was an award-winning Broadway performer and a versatile recording and concert star of the ’50s, the lithe. He became one of the first Black leading men in Hollywood. He ventured into production work on theatrical films and telepics.
Belafonte was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and an important voice in the ’60s civil rights movement. Belafonte won 2 Grammy Awards in 2000, a Tony and an Emmy. He also received the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Governors Awards ceremony in 2014.
Though he was born in New York, he was sent to Jamaica at age 5 to live with his grandmother. He returned to New York for high school. Jamaica, however, shaped his musical repertoire.
Belafonte first made his mark, however, as a nightclub singer. Initially working in a pop and jazz vein, Belafonte began his singing career at New York’s Royal Roost and made his recording debut in 1949 on Roost Records. He soon developed a growing interest in American folk music.
A national tour and dates at New York’s Village Vanguard and Blue Angel followed. A scout for MGM spotted him at the latter venue and, following a screen test, Belafonte secured a role opposite Dorothy Dandridge in “Bright Road” (1953).
He made a debut in “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac,” for which he received the Tony for best performance by a featured actor in a musical.
Ironically, while Belafonte was cast as a lead in Otto Preminger’s 1954 musical “Carmen Jones”; his singing voice was dubbed by opera singer LeVern Hutcherson. He exploded as a top pop singer in his own right.
He made his RCA Records debut in 1954 with “Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites”; the 1956 LP “Belafonte,” featuring a similar folk repertoire, spent six weeks at No. 1.
Belafonte would cut five more top-five albums including two live sets recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1961. His 1960 collection “Swing Dat Hammer” received a Grammy as a best ethnic or traditional folk album; he scored the same award for 1965’s “An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba,” a collaboration with South African folk artist Miriam Makeba.
He became the first Black performer to garner an Emmy with his 1959 special “Tonight With Belafonte.”
Belafonte made his first steps into film production, featuring in “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil” (1959) and the heist picture “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1960). Belafonte returned to feature films in 1970 in the whimsical “The Angel Levine” alongside Zero Mostel. He starred alongside Poitier in the comedies “Buck and the Preacher” (1972) and “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), both directed by Poitier.
Notably, he appeared opposite John Travolta in “White Man’s Burden” (1995), an alternate-universe fantasy-drama about racism; Robert Altman’s ensemble period drama “Kansas City” (1996); and “Bobby” (2006), Emilio Estevez’s account of Sen. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination.
In 1985, Belafonte helped organize the recording session for “We Are the World,” the all-star benefit single devoted to alleviating African famine. His appearance on that huge hit led to “Paradise in Gazankulu” (1988), his first studio recording in more than 10 years.
His latter-day production work included the 1984 hip-hop drama “Beat Street” and the 2000 miniseries “Parting the Waters,” based on historian Taylor Branch’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2002, “The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music,” an immense collection of African and African-American music recorded and compiled by Belafonte over the course of a decade and originally set for release by RCA in the ’70s, was finally released as a five-CD set on Universal’s Buddha imprint. The album had 3 Grammy nominations.
He was accorded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1989 and the National Medal of the Arts in 1994.
He is survived by his third wife Pamela; daughters Shari, Adrienne and Gina; son David; stepchildren Sarah and Lindsey; and eight grandchildren.
SUPPORT NIGERIAN CANADIAN NEWSPAPER CANADA
If you like our work and want to keep enjoying what we offer, kindly support us by donating to the Nigerian Canadian News through the button below
Share your thoughts in the comments section below
Do you want to share any news or information with us? If yes, contact the publisher at publisher@test1.nascitest.club
