Micheaux was the most prominent among the lead-
ers of this effort. Although he made about forty
feature films, only ten survive. And although Holly-
wood also tried appealing to the African American
audience with all-black musicals, its efforts were
few and disappointing. From the beginning, how-
ever, Hollywood drew many actors from various
racial backgrounds.
In the 1930s, the great comic actor Stepin
Fetchit was the first African American to receive
featured billing in the movies. Butterfly McQueen,
Louise Beavers, and Hattie McDaniel (who won
an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for
her performance in Victor Fleming’s Gone with the
Wind, 1939) all had durable careers playing such
demeaning stereotypes as maids and mammies.
Paul Robeson, a great actor and singer on the
Broadway stage, was featured in several movies,
most notably Dudley Murphy’s The Emperor Jones
(1933), James Whale’s Show Boat(1936), and Julien
Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan(1942). In the 1950s,
Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge became the
first African American movie stars. Poitier has
enjoyed an extraordinarily successful career, but
Dandridge was not so fortunate. She began by
playing stereotypical African American roles in
twenty-one movies and was later nominated for
the Oscar for Best Actress for her leading role in
Otto Preminger’s sumptuous musical production
Carmen Jones(1954) but her career ended abruptly
after starring (opposite Poitier) in Preminger’s
Porgy and Bess (1959), which despite garnering
positive reviews, was a box office failure.
Among the African Americans who have since
become stars are Pearl Bailey, Halle Berry, Diahann
Carroll, Bill Cosby, Laurence Fishburne, Jamie
Foxx, Morgan Freeman, Pam Grier, Samuel L.
Jackson, James Earl Jones, Eddie Murphy, Will
Smith, Denzel Washington, and Forest Whitaker.
Among the many Hispanic, Latino, and Asian stars
are Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem, Joan Chen,
Dolores del Rio, José Ferrer, Raul Julia, Nancy
Kwan, Fernando Lamas, Li Gong, Lucy Liu, Jen-
nifer Lopez, Keye Luke, Toshirô Mifune, Alfred
Molina, Ricardo Montalban, Maria Montez, Rita
Moreno, Haing S. Ngor, Edward James Olmos,Casting Gandhi In Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi(1982),
the English actor Ben Kingsley plays the Indian political and
spiritual leader Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
from his youth until his assassination. Born Krishna Bhanji,
the son of an Indian doctor and an English fashion model,
Kingsley looks so much like Gandhi and inhabits the role so
completely that, for many viewers, the two men are
inextricably linked.
“This door tonight has been opened”In Martha
Coolidge’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge(1999), Halle Berry
plays Dandridge, who is shown here starring as the title
character in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones(1954). For her
role in that film, which featured an all-black cast, Dandridge
was the first black woman to receive an Academy Award
nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role; Grace Kelly
received the Oscar that year (for her performance in George
Seaton’s The Country Girl). Nearly fifty years later, Halle
Berry became the first African American woman to win the
Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in
Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball(2001). Berry began her
acceptance speech, “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge,
Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll... and it’s for every nameless,
faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this
door tonight has been opened.”
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