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Given his strong links to the movie industry, I thought this deserves its own thread as distinct from a "random news stories" entry. Telegraph obit:
Odds Against Tomorrow is one of my favorite movies for a whole bunch of reasons, but I've never been able to shake the feeling that Belafonte's performance was the weakest link in it. Robert Ryan and Ed Begley act him off the screen for sheer malevolence and determination, and the nightclub scene in which Belafonte sings seems to have no reason and just interrupts the flow of the story. Admittedly, that's a very minor criticism for what was a long and high achieving career. My grandmother had a 78 of The Banana Boat Song that she played to me as a toddler - apparently I always wanted to hear the verse that made reference to the tarantula!
Harry Belafonte, US singer-actor who started a craze for calypso music with hits like The Banana Boat Song – obituary
Belafonte’s 1956 album, Calypso, outsold Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, but he was later better known for his political activism
Harry Belafonte, the actor and singer, who has died aged 96, made his name as a calypso singer in the 1950s and had a string of hits with such easy-listening material as Banana Boat Song (more popularly known as “Day-O”), Scarlet Ribbons, Mary’s Boy Child and Island in the Sun; he might also have had an illustrious career in Hollywood, but he objected to the parts offered to black performers and turned his back on the big studios.
For a brief period in the mid-1950s Belafonte was one of America’s most successful entertainers, combining his singing career with a series of high-profile film roles. His 1956 LP Calypso was the first million-selling album, outstripping even Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Though he had two white grandparents, one on each side of his family, Belafonte always regarded himself as black. He rose to prominence at a time when miscegenation was a dirty word, yet his somewhat ambiguous good looks attracted an enthusiastic following among both black and white women, a quality which Hollywood directors attempted to exploit without quite going so far as to break racial taboos or challenge racial stereotypes.
In his film The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), in which he played one of three survivors in a world devastated by nuclear conflict (the other two survivors being a white man and a white woman), a liaison between Belafonte and the white actress, Inger Stevens, was suggested by the advance publicity, but nothing untoward happens in the film.
This caution would appear to be justified, for when, in 1957, Belafonte had had the temerity to stand near Joan Fontaine in Island in the Sun, cinemas were torched by members of the Ku Klux Klan to protect the young from such subversive influences.
Belafonte claimed he had tried to persuade Hollywood producers to let his characters behave like human beings but was told that the world was not ready for a black man to touch a white woman on film. Belafonte was disgusted: “They were prepared to discuss the world blowing up into little pieces but not an honest interracial relationship.”
After a while, he started turning down offers of parts. He refused Porgy and Bess, so the film producers offered him Lilies of the Field, about a black man who helps some nuns to set up a mission. Belafonte read the script and was outraged: “What motivates the man? Where does he come from? What does he want?” he demanded to know. “The man’s a cipher.” His friend Sidney Poitier had no such qualms and won an Oscar for his performance. Belafonte, however, turned his back on Hollywood and did not perform again for 20 years.
Harold George Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York, on March 1 1927 to illegal Jamaican immigrants. His early life was a struggle for survival; his father turned up infrequently, and when he did he was drunk and violent. Harry and his mother moved around a lot, wherever she could find casual work. He had no friends, never staying anywhere long enough to develop attachments, and soon dropped out of school.
Sunday-afternoon cinema offered him an escape: he loved Tarzan movies. The first film he saw where a black man played a leading role was in the early years of the Second World War. It was part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s scheme to glorify the universality of the war effort, and the film featured black soldiers as heroes.
The 17-year-old Belafonte immediately volunteered for active service in the US Navy but found that the reality was very different from the cinema myth. The American armed services observed strict segregation and Belafonte was given menial tasks, loading munitions and scrubbing decks in a dockyard.
But for the first time he met black Americans from beyond the ghettos, educated men who spent their leisure time reading and debating politics. Belafonte graduated in their direction and learnt about slavery and the oppression. He emerged from the navy a bitter but more sophisticated man.
After the war, Belafonte settled in New York, and after working a variety of odd jobs found a calling in acting. As a member of the American Negro Theater in Harlem he took his first leading role in Juno and the Paycock and met Paul Robeson, who became his hero, and Sidney Poitier, who became a friend. At the same time he studied drama at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis.
As Belafonte began to achieve success as an actor, he stumbled into a singing career, launching his recording career as a pop singer on the Jubilee label in 1949. In the early 1950s he graduated to folk music, getting his material from the Library of Congress’s American folk songs archives, and also West Indian calypso music.
In 1953 he appeared with the guitarist Millard Thomas at the Village Vanguard jazz club, and the same year made his film debut in Bright Road, playing opposite Dorothy Dandridge. His performance the following year as the only black member of the cast of John Murray Anderson’s Broadway revue, Almanac, earned him a Tony award.
With his lead role in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones (1954), Belafonte shot to stardom. The film, in which he paired up again with Dorothy Dandridge, drew attention to his sensual good looks and placed Belafonte alongside Sidney Poitier as the most sought-after black actor in the world.
After signing up with the RCA label, he issued Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites, which reached No 3 in the Billboard charts in the early weeks of 1956. His next effort, entitled Belafonte, reached No 1, kick-starting a national craze for calypso music which saw even Robert Mitchum make his own calypso album.
But it was the release of Calypso in 1956 that put Belafonte on top. The album sold 1·5 million copies, a massive hit for its time. It topped the charts for 31 weeks on the strength of hits like Jamaica Farewell and Banana Boat Song.
Following the success of his next album, An Evening With Belafonte (1957), and its hit Mary’s Boy Child, Belafonte returned to film, using his clout to press for more complex and realistic roles. After the controversial Island in the Sun, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) cast him as a bank robber teamed with a racist accomplice. Also in 1959 he released the album Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, with a sequel, Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, in 1960.
Belafonte’s appeal to white audiences did not, however, protect him from segregationism. As a result, he refused to perform in the South and became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. A close friend of Martin Luther King, he put up the money to bail King out of the Birmingham city jail.
He also financed the Freedom Rides and supported registration drives, encouraging blacks to register to vote. He joined Bayard Rustin in leading the youth march for integrated schools from New York to Washington in 1958 and helped to organise the March on Washington five years later.
As a result of his involvement in civil rights causes, Belafonte became increasingly angry about the “Uncle Tom” roles given to black actors by the big Hollywood studios. On the principle that if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em, he formed his own production company, Harbel, teaming up with the then unknown Norman Jewison to produce films and television shows by and about black Americans.
In 1959 they produced a musical special, Tonight with Harry Belafonte, which earned Belafonte an Emmy Award, and the company went on to produce a number of Emmy-nominated successes for the three major US television networks.
He continued his prolific album output with Jump Up Calypso (1961) and The Midnight Special (1962), which featured the first recorded appearance by a young harmonica player named Bob Dylan. But as The Beatles’ brand of pop music began to dominate the charts, Belafonte’s commercial appeal diminished.
Belafonte at the Greek Theatre (1964) was his last album to reach the Top 40, and subsequent efforts, including An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965) and In My Quiet Room (1966) struggled to make it into the top 100. Homeward Bound (1969) earned Belafonte his final chart appearance.
Although he continued to record, Belafonte became better known for his political activities. He worked as cultural adviser to the Peace Corps under President Kennedy, chairing the New York State Martin Luther King Jr Commission and founding the Institute for Non-Violence.
His idea for the hit charity song We Are the World generated more than $70 million to fight famine in Ethiopia in 1985.
Two years later he became the second American to be named Unicef Goodwill Ambassador, hosting the United Nations World Summit for Children. He recorded an album of South African music, Paradise in Gazankulu, in 1988 and chaired the welcoming committee for Nelson Mandela’s visit to the United States the same year.
After a long absence from the screen, Belafonte resurfaced in the mid-1990s in a number of film roles, most notably in the reverse-racism drama White Man’s Burden and Robert Altman’s jazz-era period piece Kansas City.
Harry Belafonte was thrice married. His first marriage, to Marguerite Byrd, was dissolved, and he married, secondly, in 1957, Julie Robinson. They divorced in 2004, and in 2008 he married Pamela Frank. She survives him along with two daughters from his first marriage, a daughter and son from his second marriage and a stepdaughter and stepson from his third.
Harry Belafonte, born March 1 1927, died April 25 2023
Belafonte’s 1956 album, Calypso, outsold Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, but he was later better known for his political activism
Harry Belafonte, the actor and singer, who has died aged 96, made his name as a calypso singer in the 1950s and had a string of hits with such easy-listening material as Banana Boat Song (more popularly known as “Day-O”), Scarlet Ribbons, Mary’s Boy Child and Island in the Sun; he might also have had an illustrious career in Hollywood, but he objected to the parts offered to black performers and turned his back on the big studios.
For a brief period in the mid-1950s Belafonte was one of America’s most successful entertainers, combining his singing career with a series of high-profile film roles. His 1956 LP Calypso was the first million-selling album, outstripping even Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Though he had two white grandparents, one on each side of his family, Belafonte always regarded himself as black. He rose to prominence at a time when miscegenation was a dirty word, yet his somewhat ambiguous good looks attracted an enthusiastic following among both black and white women, a quality which Hollywood directors attempted to exploit without quite going so far as to break racial taboos or challenge racial stereotypes.
In his film The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), in which he played one of three survivors in a world devastated by nuclear conflict (the other two survivors being a white man and a white woman), a liaison between Belafonte and the white actress, Inger Stevens, was suggested by the advance publicity, but nothing untoward happens in the film.
This caution would appear to be justified, for when, in 1957, Belafonte had had the temerity to stand near Joan Fontaine in Island in the Sun, cinemas were torched by members of the Ku Klux Klan to protect the young from such subversive influences.
Belafonte claimed he had tried to persuade Hollywood producers to let his characters behave like human beings but was told that the world was not ready for a black man to touch a white woman on film. Belafonte was disgusted: “They were prepared to discuss the world blowing up into little pieces but not an honest interracial relationship.”
After a while, he started turning down offers of parts. He refused Porgy and Bess, so the film producers offered him Lilies of the Field, about a black man who helps some nuns to set up a mission. Belafonte read the script and was outraged: “What motivates the man? Where does he come from? What does he want?” he demanded to know. “The man’s a cipher.” His friend Sidney Poitier had no such qualms and won an Oscar for his performance. Belafonte, however, turned his back on Hollywood and did not perform again for 20 years.
Harold George Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York, on March 1 1927 to illegal Jamaican immigrants. His early life was a struggle for survival; his father turned up infrequently, and when he did he was drunk and violent. Harry and his mother moved around a lot, wherever she could find casual work. He had no friends, never staying anywhere long enough to develop attachments, and soon dropped out of school.
Sunday-afternoon cinema offered him an escape: he loved Tarzan movies. The first film he saw where a black man played a leading role was in the early years of the Second World War. It was part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s scheme to glorify the universality of the war effort, and the film featured black soldiers as heroes.
The 17-year-old Belafonte immediately volunteered for active service in the US Navy but found that the reality was very different from the cinema myth. The American armed services observed strict segregation and Belafonte was given menial tasks, loading munitions and scrubbing decks in a dockyard.
But for the first time he met black Americans from beyond the ghettos, educated men who spent their leisure time reading and debating politics. Belafonte graduated in their direction and learnt about slavery and the oppression. He emerged from the navy a bitter but more sophisticated man.
After the war, Belafonte settled in New York, and after working a variety of odd jobs found a calling in acting. As a member of the American Negro Theater in Harlem he took his first leading role in Juno and the Paycock and met Paul Robeson, who became his hero, and Sidney Poitier, who became a friend. At the same time he studied drama at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis.
As Belafonte began to achieve success as an actor, he stumbled into a singing career, launching his recording career as a pop singer on the Jubilee label in 1949. In the early 1950s he graduated to folk music, getting his material from the Library of Congress’s American folk songs archives, and also West Indian calypso music.
In 1953 he appeared with the guitarist Millard Thomas at the Village Vanguard jazz club, and the same year made his film debut in Bright Road, playing opposite Dorothy Dandridge. His performance the following year as the only black member of the cast of John Murray Anderson’s Broadway revue, Almanac, earned him a Tony award.
With his lead role in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones (1954), Belafonte shot to stardom. The film, in which he paired up again with Dorothy Dandridge, drew attention to his sensual good looks and placed Belafonte alongside Sidney Poitier as the most sought-after black actor in the world.
After signing up with the RCA label, he issued Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites, which reached No 3 in the Billboard charts in the early weeks of 1956. His next effort, entitled Belafonte, reached No 1, kick-starting a national craze for calypso music which saw even Robert Mitchum make his own calypso album.
But it was the release of Calypso in 1956 that put Belafonte on top. The album sold 1·5 million copies, a massive hit for its time. It topped the charts for 31 weeks on the strength of hits like Jamaica Farewell and Banana Boat Song.
Following the success of his next album, An Evening With Belafonte (1957), and its hit Mary’s Boy Child, Belafonte returned to film, using his clout to press for more complex and realistic roles. After the controversial Island in the Sun, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) cast him as a bank robber teamed with a racist accomplice. Also in 1959 he released the album Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, with a sequel, Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, in 1960.
Belafonte’s appeal to white audiences did not, however, protect him from segregationism. As a result, he refused to perform in the South and became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. A close friend of Martin Luther King, he put up the money to bail King out of the Birmingham city jail.
He also financed the Freedom Rides and supported registration drives, encouraging blacks to register to vote. He joined Bayard Rustin in leading the youth march for integrated schools from New York to Washington in 1958 and helped to organise the March on Washington five years later.
As a result of his involvement in civil rights causes, Belafonte became increasingly angry about the “Uncle Tom” roles given to black actors by the big Hollywood studios. On the principle that if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em, he formed his own production company, Harbel, teaming up with the then unknown Norman Jewison to produce films and television shows by and about black Americans.
In 1959 they produced a musical special, Tonight with Harry Belafonte, which earned Belafonte an Emmy Award, and the company went on to produce a number of Emmy-nominated successes for the three major US television networks.
He continued his prolific album output with Jump Up Calypso (1961) and The Midnight Special (1962), which featured the first recorded appearance by a young harmonica player named Bob Dylan. But as The Beatles’ brand of pop music began to dominate the charts, Belafonte’s commercial appeal diminished.
Belafonte at the Greek Theatre (1964) was his last album to reach the Top 40, and subsequent efforts, including An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965) and In My Quiet Room (1966) struggled to make it into the top 100. Homeward Bound (1969) earned Belafonte his final chart appearance.
Although he continued to record, Belafonte became better known for his political activities. He worked as cultural adviser to the Peace Corps under President Kennedy, chairing the New York State Martin Luther King Jr Commission and founding the Institute for Non-Violence.
His idea for the hit charity song We Are the World generated more than $70 million to fight famine in Ethiopia in 1985.
Two years later he became the second American to be named Unicef Goodwill Ambassador, hosting the United Nations World Summit for Children. He recorded an album of South African music, Paradise in Gazankulu, in 1988 and chaired the welcoming committee for Nelson Mandela’s visit to the United States the same year.
After a long absence from the screen, Belafonte resurfaced in the mid-1990s in a number of film roles, most notably in the reverse-racism drama White Man’s Burden and Robert Altman’s jazz-era period piece Kansas City.
Harry Belafonte was thrice married. His first marriage, to Marguerite Byrd, was dissolved, and he married, secondly, in 1957, Julie Robinson. They divorced in 2004, and in 2008 he married Pamela Frank. She survives him along with two daughters from his first marriage, a daughter and son from his second marriage and a stepdaughter and stepson from his third.
Harry Belafonte, born March 1 1927, died April 25 2023
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