Lena Horne was a pioneer of both music and screen. Beautiful, sophisticated and blessed with talent, her later success belied her difficult upbringing. This Throwback Thursday, we're observing Horne's 100th birth anniversary by looking at her extraordinary career.
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn to a numbers runner and an actress. She lived with her grandparents; her civic-minded grandmother, Cora, was a member of the women's suffrage movement and the NAACP. Thanks to Cora, Horne was a member of the NAACP at 2 years old. She later spent a nomadic existence with her mother. Horne attended school until she was about 16, when she quit to work at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem. She invested some of her wages in music lessons and worked with luminaries like Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
Her first movie role was in The Duke Is Tops, but her career really took off when she signed a contract at MGM. In most of her movies at this time, Horne was only on for a musical number that could easily be spliced out if the movie was shown in Southern theaters. In Cabin in the Sky, Horne played the larger role of Georgia Brown, an agent of the devil sent to tempt the hapless main character away from his wife.
Horne also starred as the love interest in Stormy Weather, a musical about the life of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Her performance of the title song is considered a classic.
Horne spoke out against discrimination and was blacklisted from Hollywood in the late 1940s. This didn't keep her from singing on TV or the stage. She also sang at NAACP rallies and participated at the March on Washington in 1963. She continued to perform for the rest of her life, staring in the longest-running one-woman show on Broadway in the 1980s and gaining many lifetime awards. The first time I saw Horne was in The Wiz as Glenda the Good. This was her final film performance.
Lena Horne was a glamorous movie star and performer at a time when African American actors were often limited to roles as domestic workers. Her style is so fun and visual that it's no surprise she was a treat to see live. If you'd like to learn more about Lena Horne's extraordinary life, I recommend one of her biographies, appropriately titled Stormy Weather.
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