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Diahann Carroll, TV’s history-making star of NBC’s 1960s sitcom Julia and Broadway’s Tony Award-winning star of the 1962 musical No Strings, died today of cancer, the Associated Press has reported. The Dynasty star was 84.
Already a popular stage and nightclub performer when she signed on to star in Julia, Carroll is credited with being the first African-American actress to lead a primetime series in a non-stereotypical role, and the first overall since Beulah, the 1950s sitcom about a maid.
Julia became an immediate hit when it launched in September 1968, finishing at No. 7 among all primetime programs that season. The series was canceled after the 1971 season.
Born in The Bronx and becoming an Ebony model at 15 and, several years later, a winning singer on TV’s Chance of a Lifetime talent contest, Carroll soon became a popular nightclub attraction before staking her Hollywood claim with 1954’s Carmen Jones and 1959’s Porgy and Bess. By that point, she’d already appeared on Broadway, starring in ’54’s Harold Arlen-Truman Capote musical House of Flowers.
Various episodic TV appearances and a role in the 1967 Otto Preminger star-packed feature Hurry Sundown followed, but her big, starmaking breakthrough came with Julia, the half-hour comedy that showcased Carroll as a nurse and Vietnam War widow raising her young son (Marc Copage) on her own. The series co-starred Lloyd Nolan as her cranky but compassionate doctor boss.
The role won Carroll a 1968 Best Actress/TV Golden Globe Award.
In 1974, Carroll starred in the feature film Claudine, playing the title character – a Harlem mother of six struggling to support her family and falling in love with a garbage collector played by James Earl Jones (the movie introduced a young Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who found wider fame the following year in TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter). Carroll was Oscar-nominated for her performance.
Various TV appearances followed (Roots: The Next Generations, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, even the destined-for-cult-classic-status The Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978), but Carroll’s next pioneering move came with her portrayal of Dominique Deveraux, first in 1984 on Dynasty and, later, the show’s spin-off The Colbys. Her casting as a mixed-race diva – Dominique was the half-sister of series star John Forsythe’s Blake Carrington – was a breakthrough for the primetime soaps of the day, and reunited her with her real-life high school classmate Billy Dee Williams.
Carroll stayed active well into the new century, with roles in The Five Heartbeats, Lonesome Dove: The Series, Grey’s Anatomy, White Collar, and the Lifetime movies At Risk and The Front, among many others.
