Dorothy Dandridge

Biography: Dorothy Dandridge

African American actress, singer, dancer Dorothy Dandridge, the daughter of stage and screen actress Ruby Dandridge, began performing professionally in the song-and-dance duo "The Wonder Children" with her sister Vivian at age four; they toured parts of the South, performing at churches, schools, and social gatherings. In the 1930s her family relocated to Los Angeles, and she and her sister appeared briefly in the Marx brothers comedy A Day at the Races (1937). In their teens she and her sister enlisted a third singer and formed a new group, the Dandridge Sisters. They worked with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and Cab Calloway, appeared at the Cotton Club, and turned up with Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan in the film Going Places (1939). Dandridge started performing solo in the early '40s, appearing in a string of musical shorts made in 1941 and 1942; she also performed in several features in the same years, including Sun Valley Serenade (1942), during the production of which she met her first husband, the dancer Harold Nicholas. After her marriage she put her career on hold for a while, but the birth of a severely brain-damaged daughter strained her marriage and it soon ended in divorce, following which she put most of her energy into her career. She became popular and famous as a sultry nightclub entertainer, then began to make her mark in movies with her notable appearance in Tarzan's Peril (1951), in which she played a sexy African princess. For her work in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) she received a "Best Actress" Oscar nomination, becoming the first black women to do so. Three years went by before her next role, in Island in the Sun (1957), in which she again made history by being the first black actress cast romantically with a white actor in a film. For her work in Preminger's Porgy and Bess (1959) she won the Golden Globe Award as "Best Actress in a Musical." After a few more years she found it difficult to get lead roles in films, and went back to nightclubs. In 1965 she signed a new film contract, but her rebounding luck was short-lived -- she was found dead from an overdose of anti-depressants. ~ All Movie Guide less

Find videos of Dorothy DandridgeFree Dorothy Dandridge videos

Movies (9)
Videos

Malaga (1960)
Cast: Dorothy Dandridge Trevor Howard Desmond Dickinson Michael Hordern Laslo Benedek
Tags: Adventure Crime
Length: 97min
This routine crime drama with a dash of romance begins with a tense opening, a jewel theft is carried out almost without a word of dialogue. One of the thieves, John Bain (Trevor Howard) an expert locksmith plagued by a stint in prison, has been...
Find Videos

Porgy and Bess (1959)
Cast: Sidney Poitier Samuel Goldwyn Dorothy Dandridge Pearl Bailey Otto Preminger
Tags: Musical Romance Operetta Musical
Length: 138min
A stellar line-up of African-American actors and musical stars helped to bring DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin's classic operetta to this screen in this lavishly-produced adaptation. Porgy (Sidney Poitier) is a crippled man living in the shantytown of...
Find Videos

Tamango (1958)
Cast: Dorothy Dandridge John Berry Curd Jürgens Jean Servais Roger Hanin
Tags: Romantic Adventure Adventure Drama Adventure Drama
Length: 98min
Adapted from a novelette by Prosper Merimée, Tamango ran into censorship problems in the U.S. for several reasons, not least of which was the fact that its director, John Berry, had been blacklisted during the Communist witch hunt. Set during the...
Find Videos

The Decks Ran Red (1958)
Cast: James Mason Broderick Crawford Dorothy Dandridge Stuart Whitman Andrew L. Stone
Tags: Thriller
Length: 84min
In this sea-going suspense drama, Edwin Rumill (James Mason) is the former first mate of an ocean liner who leaps at the chance to have a vessel under his full command. However, the S.S. Berwind is no ship to write home about, a freighter from the...
Find Videos

Island in the Sun (1957)
Cast: James Mason Joan Fontaine Dorothy Dandridge Darryl F. Zanuck Harry Belafonte
Tags: Political Drama Drama Crime
Length: 119min
Political intrigue and romantic gamesmanship send an already torrid Caribbean community to the boiling point in this drama. Maxwell Fleury (James Mason) and David Boyeur (Harry Belafonte) are two men running for political office in a...
Find Videos

Carmen Jones (1954)
Cast: Harry Belafonte Otto Preminger Pearl Bailey Dorothy Dandridge Oscar Hammerstein II
Tags: Musical Romance Film-Opera Musical
Length: 120min
In 1943, Oscar Hammerstein Jr. took Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, rewrote the lyrics, changed the characters from 19th century Spaniards to World War II-era African-Americans, switched the locale to a Southern military base, and the result was Carmen...
Find Videos

Bright Road (1953)
Cast: Harry Belafonte Dorothy Dandridge Robert Horton David Rose Alfred Gilks
Tags: Drama
Length: 68min
Bright Road was a real rarity in 1953: a major-studio production with an all-black cast. Based on an award-winning short story by Mary Elizabeth Vroman, the film is largely set at a rural black school in an unspecified Southern community. Idealistic...
Find Videos

The Harlem Globetrotters (1951)
Cast: Dorothy Dandridge Thomas Gomez Bill Walker Will Jason William Forrest
Tags: Comedy Drama Sports Drama
Length: 78min
The story of the legendary Harlem Globetrotters takes second place to the rise to prominence of All-American athlete Billy Brown (a star Globetrotter, here playing himself). While still in college, Brown drops his education in favor of joining the...
Find Videos

Change of Heart (1943)
Cast: Susan Hayward Dorothy Dandridge John Carroll Gail Patrick Melville Cooper
Tags: Comedy Romance
Length: 90min
Change of Heart is the reissue title of the Republic musical Hit Parade of 1943. The studio had been turning out these annual Hit Parade extravaganzas since 1941, but only the 1943 edition truly hit the bullseye. The plot, wherein fading songwriter...
Find Videos

Dorothy Dandridge

Biography: Dorothy Dandridge

Searching for videos...

Related Clips

Share This Page

Video Search