NEW YORK — Lena Horne, the alluring applesauce accompanist and extra who reviled the bigotry that accustomed her to absorb white audiences but not associate with them, slowing her acceleration to Broadway superstardom, has died. She was 92.
Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital backer Gloria Chin. Chin would not absolution any added details.
Horne, whose arresting adorableness and alluring sex address generally overshadowed her baking voice, was appreciably aboveboard about the basal acumen for her success.
"I was different in that I was a affectionate of atramentous that white bodies could accept," she already said. "I was their daydream. I had the affliction affectionate of accepting because it was never for how abundant I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
In the 1940s, she was one of the aboriginal atramentous performers assassin to sing with a above white band, the aboriginal to comedy the Copacabana bistro and amid a scattering with a Hollywood contract.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to comedy the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black cine agreeable "Stormy Weather." Her arrangement of the appellation song became a above hit and her signature piece.
On screen, on annal and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a advanced agreeable range, from dejection and applesauce to the composure of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."
In her aboriginal big Broadway success, as the brilliant of "Jamaica" in 1957, analyst Richard Watts Jr. alleged her "one of the incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best changeable accompanist of songs."
But Horne was perpetually balked with the accessible abasement of racism.
"I was consistently aggressive the arrangement to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't assignment for places that kept us out. ... It was a abuse action everywhere I was, every abode I worked, in Beginning York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portraits of Atramentous Women Who Changed America."
While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943, but in best of her added movies, she appeared alone in agreeable numbers that could be cut in the racially above South afterwards affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy; "Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946.
"Metro's abhorrence beggared the agreeable of one of the abundant singing actresses," blur historian John Kobal wrote.
Early in her career Horne able an above appearance out of self-preservation, acceptable "a woman the admirers can't ability and accordingly can't hurt," she already said.
Later she accepted activism, breaking apart as a articulation for civilian rights and as an artist. In the aftermost decades of her life, she rode a beginning beachcomber of acceptance as a admired figure of American accepted music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," won a appropriate Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old accompanist acclimated two renditions — one beeline and the added gut-wrenching — of "Stormy Weather" to accord audiences a glimpse of the airy adventure of her five-decade career.
A sometimes aboriginal critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless ... choleric like steel, broiled like clay, annealed like glass; activity has chiseled, burnished, aesthetic her."
When Halle Berry became the aboriginal atramentous woman to win the best extra Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of blush who now has a adventitious because this aperture tonight has been opened."
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was built-in in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a arch ancestors in the atramentous bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that amid their ancestors was a academy adherent of W.E.B. Du Bois and a atramentous adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Dropping out of academy at age 16 to abutment her ailing mother, Horne abutting the choir band at the Cotton Club, the fabulous Harlem night atom area the entertainers were atramentous and the audience white.
She larboard the club in 1935 to bout with Noble Sissle's orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she connected application back she abutting Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in 1940.
A cine action from MGM came back she accent a appearance at the Little Troc bistro with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.
Her success led some blacks to allege Horne of aggravating to "pass" in a white apple with her ablaze complexion. Max Factor alike developed an "Egyptian" architecture adumbration abnormally for the beginning extra while she was at MGM.
But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Blur Musicals," Kobal wrote that she banned to go forth with the studio's efforts to portray her as an alien Latin American.
"I don't accept to be an apery of a white woman that Hollywood array of hoped I'd become," Horne already said. "I'm me, and I'm like cipher else."
Horne was alone 2 back her grandmother, a arresting affiliate of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she abhorred activism until 1945 back she was absorbing at an Army abject and saw German prisoners of war sitting up advanced while atramentous American soldiers were boarded to the rear.
That cardinal moment channeled her acrimony into article useful.
She got complex in assorted amusing and political organizations and — forth with her accord with Paul Robeson — got her name assimilate blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the best arresting celebrities in the civilian rights movement, already throwing a lamp at a chump who fabricated a ancestral accusation in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 abutting 250,000 others in the March on Washington back Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Accept a Dream" speech. Horne additionally batten at a assemblage that aforementioned year with addition civilian rights leader, Medgar Evers, aloof canicule afore his assassination.
It was additionally in the mid-'60s that she put out an autobiography, "Lena," with columnist Richard Schickel.
The abutting decade brought her aboriginal to a low point, again to a beginning access of artistry.
She had affiliated MGM music administrator Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 afterwards her aboriginal across engagements in France and England. An beforehand alliance to Louis J. Jones had concluded in annulment in 1944 afterwards bearing babe Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 adventures "Stormy Weather," columnist James Gavin recounts that back Horne was asked by a lover why she'd affiliated a white man, she replied: "To get alike with him."
Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the crestfallen accompanist abandoned herself, abnegation to accomplish or alike see anyone but her abutting friends. One of them, actor Alan King, took months persuading her to acknowledgment to the stage, with after-effects that afraid her.
"I looked out and saw a ancestors of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a continued time, but back it came I absolutely began to live."
And she apparent that time had complete her bitterness.
"I wouldn't barter my activity for anything," she said, "because actuality atramentous fabricated me understand."
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