Harry Belafonte obituary | Harry Belafonte

By the mid-Fifties, the singer Harry Belafonte had taken the lead position in an Oscar-nominated movie, Carmen Jones; reached No 1 together with his album Calypso, which helped discover a mainstream viewers for that musical model and have become the primary album ever to promote greater than 1m copies; and headlined main venues across the US.

Nonetheless, Belafonte discovered himself unable to make use of the primary entrance to the Las Vegas resorts the place he repeatedly carried out – nor might he eat, keep or gamble in them. On tour within the south, he confronted a night curfew due to his pores and skin color. When he starred with Joan Fontaine within the then controversial movie about an interracial relationship, Island within the Solar (1957), he was suggested to not point out Fontaine in press interviews for concern of suggesting a romance between them. He realized that the facility and respect that often accompany fame and fortune might be largely illusory so far as black entertainers have been involved.

The enduringly good-looking Belafonte, who has died aged 96, had nice success not simply as a honey-voiced singer and a compelling actor, but additionally as a passionate and erudite campaigner for civil rights.

The seeds of his ambition and his social conscience have been sown by his robust childhood. Harold Bellanfanti was born in Harlem, New York, and raised in a cramped condominium. His mother and father got here from the Caribbean. His father, additionally referred to as Harold, had been born in Martinique and was an itinerant ship’s prepare dinner; his mom, Melvine, born in Jamaica, labored as a home servant.

When Harry was six, his father left the household.

The boy was despatched by his mom to check in Jamaica, the place his American accent made him really feel like an outsider in school. In Jamaica, he liked visiting the banana markets; a few years later, after his worldwide success with The Banana Boat Tune (Day-O), he noticed: “Not by probability did that music change into my signature. I knew of what I used to be singing.”

After a number of years, Belafonte returned to New York, dropped out of highschool and entered the navy. It was 1944 and he was 17. Two strokes of excellent fortune modified his life. First, he met Marguerite Byrd, a younger instructor from a black middle-class household, who 4 years later grew to become his spouse. He deserted the menial jobs he had been doing and, due to the GI Invoice of Rights, grew to become a scholar and enrolled at Erwin Piscator’s drama faculty, the place his friends included Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier. With the latter, Belafonte skilled on the studio theatre of the pioneering American Negro theatre in Harlem.

Apart from some off-Broadway exhibits, he discovered little work as an actor and commenced singing, primarily in jazz golf equipment, such because the Village Vanguard and the Royal Roost in New York, incomes an inexpensive dwelling for a few years. He additionally started recording, together with a few of his personal songs. Tiring of the routine, in 1950 he opened a small restaurant, the Sage, in Greenwich Village, entertaining clients with people songs. This, and his attachment to calypsos (he grew to become referred to as “the Calypso King”), modified his model, and he was quickly performing in additional prestigious venues. He had signed a cope with Jubilee Data in 1949, and his information started to promote. All through his profession, he recorded dozens of albums, together with reside live shows at Carnegie Corridor, New York.

Belafonte received a Tony award in 1954 for his efficiency within the musical revue John Murray Anderson’s Almanac. By then, his movie profession was below means. After enjoying a headteacher in Vibrant Street (1953), he was forged in Otto Preminger’s 1954 film model of the Broadway hit Carmen Jones, reverse Dorothy Dandridge. This all-black adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen, wherein each his and Dandridge’s voices have been dubbed, was a substantial success.

In 1957, Belafonte had high 10 hits within the UK with The Banana Boat Tune and the title monitor from Island within the Solar, earlier than attaining his largest recording success with Mary’s Boy Youngster, which spent seven weeks at No 1 in 1957 and was re-released for the next two Christmases.

He began appearing on tv, toured efficiently in Europe and recorded a number of programmes for BBC tv, working for a fraction of his regular charge as a result of he loved the prolonged nature of the exhibits, which gave him time to develop his efficiency. He grew to become one of many first main artists to tour with a multiracial band and he built-in black performers into orchestras in status venues the place the musicians had been completely white.

Belafonte and Byrd divorced in 1957, and he married Julie Robinson, the primary white dancer to work with the Katherine Dunham firm. The breakdown of his marriage had led Belafonte to hunt psychiatric remedy, and his psychiatrist’s husband, a stockbroker, subsequently grew to become Belafonte’s agent and supervisor, changing Jack Rollins, the person liable for masterminding Belafonte’s early profession.

The Fifties was a interval of appreciable civil rights activism for Belafonte, who cited his good friend Martin Luther King because the dominant affect on his life. Once they first met, in 1954, they have been of their mid-20s. “His braveness was actually fairly outstanding,” Belafonte recalled. He embraced King’s message of nonviolence and lent his help to protest actions. With King, Belafonte was a kind of who deliberate the 1963 march on Washington.

Within the following 12 months, he helped to lift after which personally delivered, with the help of Poitier, $70,000 in money to help the work of the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Greenwood, Mississippi. Dealing with hostility from the Ku Klux Klan, the SNCC was striving to register black voters within the area. “In Mississippi’s vicious local weather,” Poitier wrote, “the possibilities of a Klansman taking a potshot at me have been truly fairly excessive.”

A tv present, Tonight With Harry Belafonte (1959), introduced Belafonte an Emmy, making him the primary African American man to win the award. He returned to the display in The World, the Flesh and the Satan (1959); the story of racial battle inside the science-fiction style labored successfully. In the identical 12 months he made a thriller, Odds In opposition to Tomorrow, with a racial subtext behind the animosity between two criminals.

Belafonte received a Grammy for greatest people efficiency in 1960 for a strong album of chaingang songs, Swing Dat Hammer. In 1965 he received one other Grammy for greatest people recording for an album he made with Miriam Makeba, the anti-apartheid activist. However one other musical collaboration, with Petula Clark on her TV particular in 1968, raised Belafonte’s profile additional. Throughout their efficiency of the music On the Path of Glory, Clark held Belafonte’s arm – a lot to the objection of an government from the present’s sponsor, who feared that this present of intimacy between a white lady and a black man would enrage southern audiences. Clark refused to chop the efficiency from the programme, which had a heat reception when it was broadcast.

Returning to appearing in 1970, he performed a black angel, despatched to earth to assist Zero Mostel, in The Angel Levine, which he co-produced. He fared higher producing Buck and the Preacher (1972), directed by his co-star, Poitier. The pair’s subsequent movie, Uptown Saturday Night time (1974), proved much less profitable.

Within the mid-Eighties, impressed by the success of Band Support’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, Belafonte helped to organise the charity single We Are the World, written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson and recorded by an all-star lineup of musicians together with Stevie Marvel, Paul Simon and Diana Ross. The music reached No 1 within the US and the UK and received a Grammy. In 1987 Belafonte changed Danny Kaye as Unicef’s goodwill ambassador; that 12 months he chaired an Worldwide Symposium of Artists and Intellectuals for African Youngsters in Senegal.

Having performed himself within the satires The Participant (1992) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Belafonte made a 3rd movie for the director Robert Altman, who forged him as Seldom Seen, a gang boss and membership proprietor, in Kansas Metropolis (1996), for which Belafonte obtained the New York Critics Circle award for greatest supporting actor. Though he had not taken a number one position in a characteristic movie for almost 20 years, he was sufficiently tempted by the a part of the bigoted Thaddeus Thomas in White Man’s Burden (1995), reverse John Travolta. He additionally joined the forged of Bobby (2006), Emilio Estevez’s movie about Bobby Kennedy, whom Belafonte knew within the 60s.

Belafonte belatedly thought of getting into full-time politics within the Democratic occasion, however work, social commitments and household took priority. Amongst his ongoing social considerations through the years have been the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals; a faculty for emotionally disturbed boys; the prevention of gang violence; and his personal Belafonte Basis of Music and Arts.

He remained a power to be reckoned with, in 2002 likening the then US secretary of state Colin Powell to a slave who “acquired the privilege of dwelling in the home in the event you served the grasp, precisely the best way the grasp supposed to have you ever serve him”. He lent his help to the Occupy motion in 2011, and when requested in a Guardian interview the next 12 months which dwelling particular person he most despised, he replied: “George W Bush, for his betrayal of America.”

His autobiography, My Tune (2011), was adopted by a documentary about his life, Sing Your Tune. His remaining movie position was a cameo as a veteran activist in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018).

In 2008, following divorce from his second spouse, he married Pamela Frank. She survives him, together with the 2 daughters of his first marriage, and the son and daughter from his second.
Brian Baxter

Robin Denselow writes: Harry Belafonte was one of the necessary and influential campaigning black musicians in American historical past, although for the general public at giant he was higher recognized for many of his profession for the relaxed, middle-of-the-road picture that he projected via his calypsos.

His true character was very totally different, for within the 60s he used his wealth, fame and organisational expertise to bolster the civil rights marketing campaign within the US and convey American consideration to the apartheid regime in South Africa, enjoying a vital position in selling the careers of the South African musicians Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

He was all the time a well dressed determine with a strong bodily presence and an excellent husky growl, however was additionally a person of appreciable bravery. He took half in such main occasions because the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery – the place he made speeches, however needed to go away city mendacity on the ground of a automobile, together with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, to flee the Klansmen.

However the suave crooner of calypsos was regarded with suspicion by black energy leaders due to his hyperlinks with the white institution. Belafonte had his personal marketing campaign for bringing change, and was fairly glad to speak to white politicians, although in 1986 he turned down a request from governor Mario Cuomo to face for the Democrats as senator in New York.

His agenda included forging hyperlinks between black People and Africa, and within the 60s he helped to organise a visit to a number of African nations for SNCC activists, as a result of he felt they wanted to know extra in regards to the continent. However his most necessary position in Africa was within the anti-apartheid marketing campaign, and his assist for exiled South African musicians.

Belafonte first realized about Makeba after being approached within the foyer of the Dorchester Resort in London by Trevor Huddleston, the priest (and later bishop) who helped discovered the anti-apartheid motion. Belafonte helped her to acquire a visa to the US after which guided her to changing into a world superstar. They typically carried out and toured collectively, with Makeba calling him “my huge brother”, and it was with Belafonte that she carried out in 1962 at President John F Kennedy’s birthday celebration at Madison Sq. Backyard. Belafonte helped Masekela, additionally an exile within the US, by arranging a scholarship for him.

In 1988 Belafonte launched the South African-influenced album Paradise in Gazankulu, which included the political songs Capetown and We Are the Wave, and in the identical 12 months he gave a strong speech on the Nelson Mandela seventieth birthday tribute at Wembley Stadium, watched by a tv viewers of tons of of thousands and thousands internationally. In 2003 he was reunited with Makeba, after they recorded an album collectively.

All through his profession he all the time matched his genial persona with political dedication – and typically anger. A passionate campaigner for gun management within the US, he chastised fellow black People in 2013 for failing to talk up on the problem. The simple-going calypso singer and actor was additionally a serious political power.