Hattie mcdaniel children
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On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel made history when she became the first Black person to win an Academy Award, for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. As she stood in front of her white peers at the Cocoanut Grove, she was the picture of pride and joy. “I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry,” she said, crying. “My heart is too full to tell you how I feel.”
But as biographer Jill Watts notes in the masterful Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, that same evening, McDaniel was seated at the edge of the room, close to the stage but separate from her colleagues. For McDaniel, life was a tightrope walk of trying to satisfy herself, her prejudiced bosses, and the representation-starved Black community—attempting to be all things to all people. “I always wanted to be before the public,” she once said, per Watts. “I’m always acting. I guess it’s the ham in me.”
Married four times, McDaniel was “alive to her fingertips,” friend Norman Vincent Peale told Watts. Lena Horne remembered her as “an extremely grac
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Hattie McDaniel
American actress (1895–1952)
Hattie McDaniel | |
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McDaniel in 1939 | |
| Born | (1893-06-10)June 10, 1893[1][2] Wichita, Kansas, U.S. |
| Died | October 26, 1952(1952-10-26) (aged 59) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery (West Adams, Los Angeles, U.S.) |
| Occupation(s) | Actress, singer-songwriter and comedian |
| Years active | 1920–1952 |
| Spouses |
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| Relatives | Etta McDaniel (sister) Sam McDaniel (brother) |
Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1893 – October 26, 1952) was an African-American actress, singer-songwriter, and comedian. For her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), she won the Academy Awar
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Hattie McDaniel
Film actress Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar, for her supporting role as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. She grew up in Denver, Colorado, the youngest daughter of Susan Holbert and Henry McDaniel, an ex-slave and Civil War veteran. Hattie decided to become an actress at age six. “I knew that I could sing and dance . . . my mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop,” she recalled. Singing, dancing, and acting would become her pathway out of a life of poverty. McDaniel enrolled in Denver’s East High School 1908, where she won a drama contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and joined a local minstrel troop. She left high school in 1910 to join her brother Otis McDaniel’s new carnival company, touring small towns throughout Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. To make ends meet, she took jobs as a maid and laundress. Show business in the early 1900s was a man’s world. But McDaniel and her sister Etta Goff launched an innovative all-female “black-face” minstrel show in 1914 called the McDaniel Si
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