Diahann Carroll

Born Carol Diann Johnson on July 17, 1935, in New York’s Bronx borough, Diahann Carroll entered the worlds of acting and song at a strikingly early point in life. A Metropolitan Opera scholarship came her way when she was only ten, allowing her to attend New York’s High School of Music and Art. While still in her teens she took on part-time modeling, television roles, and nightclub singing engagements, moves that opened the door to her first major stage appearance in the 1954 Harold Arlen and Truman Capote musical House of Flowers and to her screen debut the same year in the all-Black-cast updating of Bizet’s Carmen Jones.

Additional film assignments followed, among them the 1959 adaptation of Porgy & Bess, and in 1962 she received a Tony Award for her performance in the Broadway musical No Strings. Recording sessions began in the late 1950s, yielding a steady sequence of LPs across the next twenty years that included the 1957 collection Diahann Carroll Sings Harold Arlen, the 1960 collaboration Diahann Carroll and Andre Previn, and 1962’s The Fabulous Diahann Carroll.

Her late-1960s portrayal of the title character in the sitcom Julia earned both an Emmy nomination and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. In 1974 she delivered what many regard as her strongest screen work in the drama Claudine, receiving an Academy Award nomination for the role. Returning to series television in the mid-1980s, she played businesswoman Dominique Devereaux on the prime-time soap Dynasty and earned a second Emmy nomination for a guest turn on A Different World; during that same decade she issued her autobiography, the 1986 volume titled Diahann.

The 1990s brought a starring turn in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard and a national tour devoted to classic Broadway material under the banner Almost Like Being in Love: The Lerner and Loewe Songbook. A sixteen-track anthology drawn from her Columbia catalog, Nobody Sees Me Cry: The Best of the Columbia Years, appeared in 2001.