Diahann Carroll Fought the Perfect Image That Made Her a TV Pioneer

Diahann Carroll

Photo: CBS Television / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 17, 1935 The Bronx, New York City, United States
Died	October 4, 2019 (84)
Occupation	Actress and singer
Known for	Eve's Bayou, The Five Heartbeats, Carmen Jones
Awards	Tony Award · Golden Globe

Somewhere in Julia, a character asks Julia Baker about a hospital: “Is it Black?” “No,” she replies, “it’s a lovely, old red brick.” Diahann Carroll delivered it with the unbothered calm she brought to the whole NBC series, playing a nurse raising her young son alone after her husband’s death in Vietnam. That calm made her the first Black woman to headline an American television series in a role that was not a servant. It also drew the hardest criticism of her career, and the most striking thing about Carroll is how much of that criticism she voiced herself, while the show was still on the air.

The composure was trained early. Her parents, John Johnson, a subway conductor, and Mabel Johnson, a nurse, paid for dance, singing and modelling lessons for the girl they named Carol Diann Johnson. She was born in the Bronx and grew up in Harlem. At the High School of Music and Art one of her classmates was Billy Dee Williams. Still a schoolgirl, she was already modelling for Ebony. She enrolled at New York University to study sociology and promised her family she would go back to it if show business had not worked out within two years.

It did not take two years. Entering television talent contests as Diahann Carroll, she was 18 when she won the $1,000 top prize on the DuMont programme Chance of a Lifetime in January 1954 singing “Why Was I Born?”, and kept winning for four more weeks. Before the year was out she had made her film debut in Carmen Jones, as a friend of Dorothy Dandridge’s character, and her Broadway debut in House of Flowers.

Hollywood used her sparingly and not always sensibly. As Clara in Porgy and Bess, in 1959, her songs were dubbed by the opera singer Loulie Jean Norman. Paris Blues put her alongside Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Broadway gave her the bigger chance. As Barbara Woodruff, a fashion model in Paris, in Richard Rodgers’s musical No Strings, she won the 1962 Tony Award for best actress in a musical, the first Black woman to take it.

Julia premiered in 1968 and ran until 1971. Carroll won the Golden Globe for best television actress for its first season and an Emmy nomination in 1969. The premise was deliberately unthreatening: a professional woman in an integrated workplace, whose race surfaced mostly as other people’s awkwardness.

That was precisely the problem for many viewers in a decade of riots and assassinations. Critics accused the series of whitewashing Black life in America. Carroll did not argue. In a December 1968 interview with TV Guide she said that “for a hundred years we have been prevented from seeing accurate images of ourselves,” adding that “the needs of the white writer go to the superhuman being. At the moment, we are presenting the white Negro. And he has very little Negro-ness.” Forty years later, speaking to NPR, she said the show had “major, major problems” that were “expressed by both communities, black and white,” and defended her choice plainly: “I took it because I liked the work.” The canonised image of Carroll as a serene pioneer flattens this. She knew the role was a compromise, said so in public and took it anyway, because in 1968 that compromise was more than network television had ever offered a Black actress.

Her answer came on film. Claudine, in 1974, cast her as a Harlem mother of six living on welfare and secretly working as a housekeeper, courted by James Earl Jones’s garbage collector. The part had been written for Diana Sands, who appeared on Julia as Julia’s cousin; when Sands became too ill with cancer to continue, she recommended Carroll. The performance earned Carroll an Academy Award nomination for best actress.

The second answer was louder. Dynasty, the glossiest soap in prime time, had no Black woman in its main cast, and she went after the part that did not yet exist. “I wanted to be the first Black bitch on television,” she recalled in a recording NPR later aired. “I picked up the telephone, and I called my manager, Roy Gerber. And I said, do me a favor. Get the word around. And for heaven’s sakes, please call Aaron Spelling.” She joined at the end of the fourth season, in 1984, as Dominique Deveraux, the half-sister of Blake Carrington, and stayed until 1987. The poise that critics had read as accommodation in Julia became, in Dominique, a weapon aimed straight at Joan Collins’s Alexis. “I don’t sleep in my clothes, nor do I sleep with them,” Dominique announced. “I require one bedroom for my wardrobe and one for myself.”

The later work leaned on that authority. She played Marion Gilbert, Whitley’s formidable mother, in A Different World from 1989, earning another Emmy nomination, and took on Norma Desmond in the Canadian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. She was part of Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou in 1997, was the demanding Jane Burke in Grey’s Anatomy and June, the wealthy widow who rents a room to a con man, in White Collar. Her five Emmy nominations run from 1963 to 2008. At the 2013 Emmys she said of the nominee Kerry Washington: “She better get this award.”

She told her own story in two memoirs, Diahann! and The Legs Are the Last to Go. She married four times: the producer Monte Kay, father of her daughter, the journalist and screenwriter Suzanne Kay; the businessman Fred Glusman, briefly; Robert DeLeon, managing editor of Jet, who was killed in a car crash in 1977; and the singer Vic Damone. She wrote frankly about a nine-year relationship with Sidney Poitier, and was engaged for three years to David Frost. After a breast cancer diagnosis in 1997 she campaigned for early detection.

Carroll, born on 17 July 1935, died at her home in West Hollywood on 4 October 2019, at 84. In 2021 the PBS series American Masters placed her beside Lena Horne, Nina Simone and Cicely Tyson in the documentary How It Feels to Be Free, about Black women entertainers who used their fame against the industry that sold it. Her place in that company rests on a stubborn argument her career kept making, from Julia to Dominique: that a Black woman on screen could be elegant and ruthless at once without owing anyone an explanation. Every glossy Black lead asked whether she is “real” enough is still answering the question Carroll put to herself in 1968.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Diahann Carroll, Julia, Carmen Jones, Claudine

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