Dynasty actress and fiery anti-racism campaigner

In the early 1970s she was poised to marry the British television personality David Frost, then in his early thirties and one of London’s most eligible bachelors, who had his own nightly show on American TV.

British television personality David Frost and actress-singer Diahann Carroll at New York's Plaza Hotel where their engagement was announced in 1972.

British television personality David Frost and actress-singer Diahann Carroll at New York’s Plaza Hotel where their engagement was announced in 1972.Credit:AP

But although the couple announced their engagement in November 1972, she dumped him following a slide in his ratings, and the decision by stations in the American south to cancel his programme.

By then Diahann Carroll had earned a reputation as a fiery anti-racism campaigner, only to be accused of selling out to the white establishment as a successful actress and glamorous middle-of-the-road cabaret singer.

Articulate, opinionated and cultured, she parried such charges by pointing out that she had been a black artist competing in a white world. “I’m acceptable,” she explained, noting that her skin tone was redolent of café-au-lait. “I’m a black woman with a white image. I don’t scare the audience.”

Her road to stardom was anything but trouble-free. As an ambitious black teenager she had wanted to conquer Hollywood, but realised that the only black parts on offer were either those of perfect mother figures or hookers. Producers would not cast her in grittier roles for fear of being thought racist. In the mid-1950s she addressed her anger at her predicament during four years of psychoanalysis and drug therapy, including controlled doses of LSD.

Diahann Carroll as the 19-year-old starry-eyed ingenue in House of Flowers, 1955.

Diahann Carroll as the 19-year-old starry-eyed ingenue in House of Flowers, 1955. Credit:London Express News And Feature Services

Diahann Carroll first came to notice in 1954 when, at the age of 19, she was cast as Myrt, a bit part in the film Carmen Jones, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey.

Five years later she returned to the big screen to play a supporting role in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, also directed by Preminger, who used virtually the same black cast but added Sammy Davis Jr as the drug dealer Sportin’ Life and replacing Belafonte with Sidney Poitier, with whom Diahann Carroll became romantically linked.

Although she had appeared as a singer in several popular American television shows, her big television break came in 1968 when she played a young Vietnam War widow working as a nurse in Julia, the first American primetime series to be driven by a black woman in a non-stereotypical role, such as a servant. The role earned her four Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe award.

The programme was aired on ITV in 1969, and by the following year Diahann Carroll was dating Frost, who was combining five nights a week presenting an American television show with a Saturday night chat show on ITV. The couple spent Christmas 1971 with Frost’s widowed mother at her bungalow in Beccles, Suffolk.

Nudging 50 in 1984, she stormed into the American television soap saga Dynasty (1982-89) as Blake Carrington’s illegitimate and improbable half sister, Dominique Deveraux.

High-handed and tempestuous, the character was pitched into a “bitch-fight” with the show’s star Alexis, played by Joan Collins. Diahann Carroll remained with the show for three years, and make several appearances on its short-lived spin-off, The Colbys.

Dynasty's Diahann Carroll, John Forsythe, Linda Evans and Joan Collins cut a cake to commemorate 150 episodes in 1986.

Dynasty’s Diahann Carroll, John Forsythe, Linda Evans and Joan Collins cut a cake to commemorate 150 episodes in 1986.Credit:AP

The daughter of a conductor on the New York Subway, she was born Carol Diahann Johnson in the Bronx district of New York on July 17, 1935 and brought up in Harlem. Her parents encouraged her to take dance, singing and modelling classes, and by the time she was 15 she was undertaking modelling assignments for Ebony magazine. Graduating from the High School of Music and Art, she read Sociology at New York University.

She abandoned her studies when she was 18, after she won a television talent show, Chance of a Lifetime, and was booked to sing at two New York nightclubs. Her supporting role in Carmen Jones the same year led to her featuring in the Broadway musical, House of Flowers.

In 1959, when she played Clara in the film version of Porgy and Bess, her voice was judged to be too low-pitched and the character’s singing parts were dubbed by the opera singer Loulie Jean Norman.

With Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, she starred in the 1961 film Paris Blues. In 1962, she won a Tony award for best actress (a first for a black woman) for her role as the fashion model Barbara Woodruff in the Richard Rodgers musical No Strings.

At the same time Diahann Carroll had become active in the Civil Rights movement and was present when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 march on Washington. In 1968 she joined Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman in an all-star concert in New York to raise funds for an anti-Vietnam War campaign, and later gave evidence to a Congressional hearing on racial discrimination.

Diahann Carroll was written out of Dynasty in 1987, after reports that she had made “racial” comments on the studio set. She continued to command star treatment, however, arranging with the Royal Garden Hotel in London later that year to have 22 quarts of milk delivered to her penthouse suite daily for her bath. Apparently she mixed it with hot water and took a long soak to keep her skin supple.

She was named alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis in the list of the Top 10 Female Style Makers of 1984, while Harper’s Bazaar magazine ranked her among the world’s 10 most beautiful women. As well as her accolades for Julia and the Tony for her role in No Strings, she gained an Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the title role in the love story Claudine (1974).

Diahann Carroll married four times, first to the record producer Monte Kay with whom she had a daughter. In 1973, having jilted David Frost, she married a Las Vegas boutique tycoon, Fred Glusman, only to file for divorce within a matter of weeks citing physical abuse.

Her third husband, Robert DeLeon, whom she married in 1975, was killed in a car crash two years later. Her fourth and final marriage, in 1987, to the singer Vic Damone, ended in divorce in 1996.

Telegraph, London

Diahann Carroll, born July 17 1935, died October 4 2019

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