Diahann Carroll

Carol Diann Johnson was born on the seventeenth of July 1935 at the Bronx, New York, the elder of two children of John Johnson — a New York City Transit Authority subway conductor — and Mabel Faulk Johnson, a homemaker. The family moved to Harlem when she was an infant. Her mother dedicated her from her earliest years to the stage and arranged from her sixth year private singing and dance lessons that the family economised to afford. She entered the New York High School of Music and Art at twelve and graduated in 1952 at sixteen. She enrolled at New York University to study sociology but left in her freshman year following a Vogue magazine photographic engagement that opened her early modelling career.

She made her professional stage debut at seventeen in 1954 in the Broadway musical House of Flowers — for which the lyrics by Truman Capote and music by Harold Arlen were written. She was nominated for the 1955 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She appeared the same year in the film Carmen Jones — supporting Dorothy Dandridge (placed in this archive) and Harry Belafonte. She introduced "Goodnight, My Love" — the song that established her as a cabaret performer — at the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel in 1956.

She played the role of Barbara Woodruff in the 1962 Broadway musical No Strings — written for her by Richard Rodgers — and won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, becoming the first African American woman to win the Tony in that category. She was nominated in 1974 for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Claudine — the first African American actress nominated in the lead category since Dorothy Dandridge (placed in this archive).

Her decisive television role was the title role in the NBC half-hour sitcom Julia, from the seventeenth of September 1968 to the twenty-fifth of May 1971. The role of Julia Baker — a widowed nurse raising her son alone in a non-stereotypically-Black urban setting — was the first American network television series to star a Black actress in a non-domestic role. She received two Golden Globe nominations and one Emmy nomination for the role.

She played Dominique Deveraux on Dynasty from 1984 to 1987 — the first African American actress to play a major continuing role on a prime-time soap opera — and recorded across the 1970s and 1980s the standards-and-cabaret albums by which she sustained her recording career until her death.

She died of breast cancer at Los Angeles on the fourth of October 2019, at eighty-four.

She is honored here as the first Black star of network television.