Esther Rolle

Esther Elizabeth Rolle was born on the eighth of November 1920 at Pompano Beach, Florida, the tenth of eighteen children of Jonathan Rolle and Elizabeth Iris Dames Rolle — both immigrants from the Bahamian island of Inagua to the Florida bean and tomato farming country. The Rolle family operated a small farm and the children were raised in the strict Christian Bahamian household tradition. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Miami in 1938 and moved to New York to take work as a household domestic while pursuing her secondary education.

She attended Hunter College, the New School for Social Research, the Yale School of Drama and the Asadata Dafora school of African dance — the latter the principal training ground of the New York African-modern dance movement. She danced in the late 1940s with the Shogola Oloba dance group at the Asadata Dafora school and joined in the mid-1950s the Negro Ensemble Company at Greenwich Village. She acted on the Off-Broadway stage from 1962 — including in the Negro Ensemble Company's productions of Day of Absence, Happy Ending and The Blacks.

Her decisive career-making appearance was as Florida Evans in the Norman Lear half-hour sitcom Maude from 1972 to 1974. The character was so popular that Lear and Mike Evans developed a spin-off for her — Good Times — which premiered in February 1974 and ran for six seasons. Florida Evans was the first African American matriarchal figure to anchor a network situation comedy. Rolle was the senior creative force on the show: she objected publicly to the writers' decision to develop the J. J. Walker character into a foolish-comic figure, accepted a contract clause prohibiting the term "nigger" from being used by any character — and twice left the show before the producers acceded to her conditions.

She returned to dramatic work after Good Times, winning the 1979 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries for the NBC adaptation of Maya Angelou's Summer of My German Soldier and starring in the 1979 made-for-television film The Sky's the Limit. She played the housekeeper Idella in Bruce Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy (1989). She remained active in the dramatic theatre — particularly in productions of the work of August Wilson — through the 1990s.

She died of complications of diabetes at Culver City, California, on the seventeenth of November 1998, at seventy-eight.

She is honored here as the matriarch of Good Times.