Lena Horne was an American singer, actor, dancer, and civil rights activist. Her career spanned more than seventy years and covered film, television, and theatre. She recorded and performed into the 1990s, retiring from public view in 2000. She’s your Phantom Dancer featured artist this week.

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LENA

Lena Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City in 1933. Next year she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing.

Horne made her first screen appearance as a dancer in the musical short Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party (1935).

A few years later, she toured with Noble Sissle’s Orchestra and made her first records.

She toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York.

She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC’s popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show’s resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941.

Horne left the show when she was hired to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

In 1945 and 1946, she sang with Billy Eckstine’s Orchestra.

MOVIES

In 1938 Horne was cast in the musical feature called The Duke is Tops,, later reissued with Horne’s name above the title as The Bronze Venus.

In 1941 she was in the short, Boogie Woogie Dream, featuring pianists Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Her songs in the short were later released individually as soundies.

She was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her first film was Panama Hattie (1942).

She sang the title song of Stormy Weather (1943) based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, for 20th Century Fox, while on loan from MGM. She appeared in several MGM musicals, including Cabin in the Sky (1943).

Most of Horne’s film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline. One number from Cabin in the Sky was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing “Ain’t It the Truth” while taking a bubble bath. This scene and song are featured in the film That’s Entertainment! III (1994), which also featured commentary from Horne on why the scene was deleted prior to the film’s release.

Horne was the first African-American person elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), she performed “Love” by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM’s version of Show Boat (1951), having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By, but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a friend in real life. In the documentary That’s Entertainment! III, Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne’s recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner’s voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release.

Horne became disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She made only two major appearances for MGM during the 1950s: Duchess of Idaho (1950), which was also Eleanor Powell’s final film); and the musical Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956).

She returned to the screen, playing Claire Quintana, a madam in a brothel who marries Richard Widmark, in the film Death of a Gunfighter (1969), her first straight dramatic role with no reference to her colour.

She was Glinda in The Wiz (1978), which was directed by her then son-in-law Sidney Lumet, and co-hosting the MGM retrospective That’s Entertainment! III (1994), in which she related her unkind treatment by the studio.

POST-HOLLYWOOD

Horne established herself as one of the premier nightclub performers of the post-war era. She headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Her 1957 live album, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, became the biggest-selling record by a female artist in the history of the RCA Victor label at that time.

In 1958, Horne became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for “Best Actress in a Musical”, for her part in the “Calypso” musical Jamaica (which, at Horne’s request featured her longtime friend Adelaide Hall).

From the late 1950s through to the 1960s, Horne was a staple of TV variety shows.

In 1970, she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in the hour-long Harry & Lena special and in 1973, she co-starred with Tony Bennett in Tony and Lena. Horne and Bennett subsequently toured the U.S. and U.K. in a show together. From 1976 – 80 she appeared in many TV variety shows.

On April 13, 1980, Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and host Gene Kelly were all scheduled to appear at a Gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to salute the NY City Center’s Joffrey Ballet Company. However, Pavarotti’s plane was diverted over the Atlantic and he was unable to appear.

James Nederlander was an invited Honored Guest and observed that only three people at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House asked for their money back. He asked to be introduced to Horne following her performance. In May 1981, The Nederlander Organization, Michael Frazier, and Fred Walker went on to book Horne for a four-week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne’s 65th birthday, June 30, 1982.

Later that same week, she performed the entire show again to record it for television broadcast and home video release. Horne began a tour a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the weekend of July 4, 1982. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada until June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984. In 1981, she received a Special Tony Award for the show, which also played to acclaim at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1984.

Horne holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history.

A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988’s The Men in My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1995, a “live” album capturing Horne’s Supper Club performance was released (subsequently winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 1998, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne retired from performing and largely retreated from public view, though she did return to the recording studio in 2000 to contribute vocal tracks on Simon Rattle’s Classic Ellington album.