Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, and kicking open the Oscars' front door

The Best Blacktresses is a weekly, seven-part series dedicated to the 13 Black women and their 14 performances (shout-out to two-time nominee Viola Davis) nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role in the Academy Awards’ nearly 100-year history. 

After Dorothy Dandridge made history, then subsequently faded into it, there was no one there to take her place. Well, maybe Eartha Kitt, until she got blacklisted.

Following the Carmen Jones star's groundbreaking Best Actress Oscar nod in 1955, the 1960s were bleak for major Black film actresses, which seems unimaginable considering what was going on in the country at the time. Hollywood, even in its most stringent studio days, prided itself on reflecting social issues — not necessarily that accurately or often, but the intent was there. Still, films of the era mostly ignored the Civil Rights Movement, and thus mostly ignored Black stars who weren’t Sidney Poitier.

While Poitier had defied the odds to become a leading man, where was his leading lady counterpart? There were talented Black actresses of the day — Diana Sands, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Ruby Dee — but they didn’t get the chance to play lead characters. 

Claudia McNeil was one exception. She played opposite Poitier as the matriarch in 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun, featuring Sands and Dee, and was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Best Actress. She had originated the role on Broadway, garnering her a Best Actress Tony nom, but come Oscar time, McNeil was completely shut out. The only Oscar nomination for a Black actress during the entire decade was for Poitier's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner costar Beah Richards in the supporting category.

But with the studio system dying its last death in the late '60s, the ‘70s heralded a new kind of Hollywood. One that was slightly more inclusive and slightly more progressive. Slightly. Moreover, Black artists had made significant strides in the previous decade — Poitier, Motown, Lt. Uhura — and the '70s afforded them a greater autonomy. If Hollywood wasn't giving them the parts they wanted and deserved, they could make their own films independently.

Picture it: 1972. A real banner year for film: The Godfather, Cabaret, Deep Throat. At the following year’s Oscars, in a sign of just how much things had changed from the decade prior, Diana Ross and Cicely Tyson were up for Best Actress, the first time two Black women were up for the lead prize. And it would be the only time until it happened again in 2021 (but we'll get to that in a future installment).

You could not have two more different actors and two more different roles than Ross and Tyson.

Diana Ross was, well, Diana F---ing Ross. She had been the lead singer of the most successful American musical group of the ‘60s, the Supremes, and just like Deena Jones and Beyoncé as Deena Jones eventually would, Ross ventured out on her own for solo stardom. But, aside from a guest-starring role with her fellow Supremes as nuns in an episode of Tarzan, Ross wasn’t serving dramatic actress vibes.

Nowadays, it’s perfectly normal for a pop star to waltz onto a movie set for the first time and walk away with an Oscar nomination. In truth, voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences love giving a statuette to a neophyte actor, as if to really deliver a “What, like it’s hard?” to all those fancy trained thespians who will never feel the golden glow of Oscar. But there’s also a truth in good singers being good actors, all coming down to the ability to perform and successfully translate emotion. So Ross had that going for her.  

Then there was the role: Billie Holiday, whose 1956 memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, served as the basis for Ross’ acting debut. Dandridge’s name had been bandied about to portray Holiday, who died in 1959, six years before Dandridge's own death. Carroll, Tyson, and Lola Falana were all considered for the role, but when Motown founder Berry Gordy joined the production, it became a star vehicle for his favorite star. 

Ross knew expectations were high, or maybe low, for her, so she threw herself wholeheartedly into the film. She soaked up as much information about Holiday as she could, worked with an acting coach, and modified her own singing style to emulate, but not mimic, the legendary blues singer. All her work paid off and she knocked it out of the goddamn park. 

She earned rave reviews for Lady Sings the Blues, which is otherwise just another run-of-the-mill, cradle-to-grave, soup-to-nuts biopic — the kind the Academy has always gravitated towards, from The Great Ziegfeld to, well, The United States vs. Billie Holiday. But from the moment America’s most glamorous pop star thrashes, wide-eyed and manic, onto that screen in a straightjacket, Ross basically dared the Academy not to nominate her. And they blinked. 

In contrast to Ross' pop star fame, Tyson was from the theater. She had never wanted to be an actress, but a modeling scout set her on a different path. She performed in the original Off Broadway production of Genet’s The Blacks (alongside James Earl Jones and Maya Angelou). She was the first Black woman to wear an Afro on American television (in 1962). She became the first African American to star in a TV drama (the short-lived East Side/West Side, 1963-64). Tyson was picky about her roles — sensitive, as most Black actors had to be, about how she represented her people — and she had the talent to back it up. 

Whereas Lady Sings the Blues was a big, splashy musical biopic, Sounder was a small, quiet film about a Black family in the Depression-era South, based on the 1969 YA novel of the same name by William H. Armstrong. The title refers to the name of the family’s dog. Tyson gives a beautifully restrained performance as Rebecca Morgan, a mother just trying to keep her family afloat after her husband Nathan (Paul Winfield, Oscar-nominated for Best Actor) is sent off to a work camp. 

In the movie's most famous scene, that restraint gives way to unabashed joy as Nathan returns home and Rebecca runs out to meet him, arms wide, tears streaming down her face. No one has ever run better in all of film.

Tyson picked up a slew of accolades for her performance, including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama, and Best Actress wins from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Ross, meanwhile, was nominated for a Best Actress BAFTA and competed against Tyson at the Golden Globes, and won the now-defunct Most Promising Newcomer award.

Come Oscars time, Ross and Tyson became, respectively, the second and third Black women nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Up against Liv Ullman in The Emigrants and Maggie Smith in Travels With My Aunt, Ross and Tyson lost to Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. 

Ross tried to parlay her windfall into Hollywood stardom, but only acted in two more films, 1975’s Mahogany (a camp classic) and 1978’s The Wiz (a beloved, if flawed, adaptation of the popular Broadway musical). Although, in the mid-'70s she was attached to star in The Bodyguard with Steve McQueen, a movie that would materialize years later with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner.

Mahogany, a melodrama about a supermodel turned fashion designer and the man she left behind, was a minor hit producing an Oscar-nominated, chart-topping title tune that Ross performed via satellite from Amsterdam at the ‘76 Oscars (because she’s Diana F---ing Ross). But The Wiz…The Wiz was a box office bomb, mama, and it effectively put the nail in Ross’ (and Motown's) film career. 

At the time the most expensive film musical ever made, The Wiz’s failure became a failure for all Black movies. Whenever a “Black movie” does well (Lady Sings the Blues was the 9th highest grossing film of 1972, Sounder was No. 11), it’s an anomaly, but when a “Black movie” fails, it’s an indictment. Black people are so rarely given a chance in Hollywood, to this day but especially 50 years ago, that the pressure to be perfect, to knock it out of the park every time, is untenable.

Ross, finding it hard to be taken seriously as an actress, Oscar nomination be damned, never made another theatrical film after The Wiz and just continued being Diana Ross. There are worse fates.

Meanwhile, Tyson continued to be picky, choosing only roles that spoke to her, and most often those roles were on stage or television. She won two Emmys for the TV movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and earned a nomination for Roots. Like Dandidge before her, Tyson found it difficult to find the kinds of parts she wanted, but unlike Dandridge, she didn’t find it impossible.

She worked steadily in theater and television, and occasionally in film, until her death at age 96 in 2021, along the way becoming one of the most highly revered actresses of her time. In 2018, Tyson finally got her Oscar when she was presented an Academy Honorary Award for inspiring "generations of filmmakers, actors, and audiences" with her "unforgettable performances and personal integrity."

A few years after Sounder, Tyson turned down a role that would go to Diahann Carroll, earning the latter a Best Actress Oscar nomination, Claudine. Tyson later said, in conversation with fellow acting powerhouse Viola Davis, that she “didn’t think that was the kind of woman I wanted to project.”

Carroll made her screen debut in Carmen Jones, Dandrdige’s breakout film. The younger actress had auditioned for the lead but settled for a supporting part. The same year as Carmen Jones, Carroll made her Broadway debut and would go on to become the first Black woman to win a Best Actress in a Musical Tony for 1962’s No Strings. 

Carroll made history again with Julia, the first TV show starring a Black woman who wasn’t a servant (she was a nurse), and became the first Black woman nominated for an Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Emmy. Her most prominent film role in the ‘60s was probably a supporting part in Paris Blues, opposite Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward. 

A multi-talented, multi-hyphenate old school diva, Carroll’s glamor girl bona fides belied her upbringing in Harlem, which drew her to Claudine. Tyson may not have been able to identify with the single working mother of six on welfare, but Carroll certainly did. 

“I have known this woman all my life,” Carroll wrote in her 1986 autobiography. “Claudine and I were sisters, alternate versions of the same little girls who made her way so long ago through these same Harlem streets.”

In 1974, Black cinema had undergone a radical shift. First, there was now such a thing as Black cinema, the existence of which was very important as there had been nothing before it. Blaxploitation films were in response to Hollywood’s neglect of Black stories and America’s neglect of Black neighborhoods, and as such featured Black antiheroes protecting the ghetto from the evil White Man or Woman. Blaxploitation films were pretty equal opportunity. Men kicked ass, and so did women. 

Enter Pam Grier. She embodied the new Black female lead, boldly sexual, ruthlessly violent, more caricature than character, but still something fresh and unseen in film. She was the anti-Diahann Carroll. But Carrroll was determined to get Claudine made. Well, she kinda had to be. Her friend Diana Sands had originally been the driving force behind the movie, but she died from cancer shortly after production began. Sands wanted Carroll to replace her. 

With that weighing on her, Carroll used her salary for the small independent film to hire an acting coach, to really dig deep with her characterization. The titular single mother falls in love with a free-spirited garbage man (James Earl Jones) and together they try to make a life, with the unfair welfare system hanging about their necks. Claudine can be considered a rom-com, but it’s also more of a critique of the welfare system and a sincere look at the life of a struggling Black, single mother free of the stereotypes rife in Blaxploitation films of the era. 

It’s a rare film for 1974, or even for now. And Carroll is the beating heart of the movie, painting a full-bodied picture of a Black woman who still has ambitions for her children but also desires outside of them. And it’s not a period piece, like Lady Sings the Blues or Sounder; this was a modern Black woman dealing with the circumstances life had given her. Thematically, it’s a lot like other ‘70s films about flawed white people living their flawed white lives — films that garnered its white actors awards and acclaim — but Claudine’s Blackness further complicates her story. 

Carroll was nominated for Best Actress against Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, Valerie Perrine in Lenny, and eventual winner Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. All those women went on to have further success in film, but Carroll didn’t make another picture for more than 15 years. Instead, she found a home on the small screen, making history again as “the first Black bitch on television” in Dynasty as the dynamite diva Dominique Deveraux. She died in 2019 at age 84.

The ‘70s did much better by Black actresses than the previous decades — the bar being incredibly, insultingly low. Great parts remained few and far between, but they were there. And there was also strength in numbers; more major Black stars (and filmmakers, but that's another series altogether) meant more movies about and for Black people. The Academy, then, had a choice to recognize them or not. It's a choice that the awards body is still struggling with.

And then there’s Ross. She might have never risen to the serious actress stratosphere, but nevertheless, she rose, attaining a level of stardom and success across media and decades that kicked down doors for countless woman of color, and RuPaul, after her. The funny thing about doors, though, as soon as they’re kicked open, they can just as quickly close again. 

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• Beyoncé gets emotional as Diana Ross surprises her to sing 'Happy Birthday' on stage
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• Oprah Winfrey, Viola Davis, Ava DuVernay, and more react to Diahann Carroll's death