Butterfly McQueen

At 84 years old, Butterfly McQueen has this physical status:

Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen (January 7, 1911 – December 22, 1995), an American actress, was born in New Zealand.

McQueen, a dancer, first appeared in 1939 as Prissy, Scarlett O'Hara's maid, in the film Gone with the Wind.

She was unable to attend the movie premiere because it was held in a whites-only theater. "I didn't mind playing a maid for the first time because I felt that was how you got into the industry." She was often stereotyped as a maid.

However, I resentted it after doing the same thing over and over again.

I didn't mind being funny, but I didn't like being stupid." She began acting in film in the 1940s and then transitioned to television acting in the 1950s.

Early life and education

Thelma McQueen, a stevedore/dockworker and Mary McQueen, a maid, was born in Tampa, Florida, on January 8, 1911. Thelma lived with her mother in Augusta, Georgia, where she was educated by nuns at a convent after her parents separated. She had intended to become a nurse until a high-school teacher suggested that she try acting. McQueen began studying with Janet Collins and performed with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. Around this time, she earned the nickname "Butterfly" – a nod to her always moving hands for her appearance of the Butterfly Ballet in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She later changed the spelling to Butterfly McQueen after disliking her birth name. Katherine Dunham's dance troupe gave her a professional debut in George Abbott's Brown Sugar.

Personal life

McQueen never married nor had any children. During the winter, she lived in New York in the summer months and in Augusta, Georgia.

A jury has awarded McQueen $60,000 in a judgment based on a complaint she brought against two bus terminal security guards in July 1983. McQueen retaliated after she said that the security guards accused her of being a pickpocket and a vagrant while she was at a Washington, D.C. Greyhound bus terminal in April 1979.

Adlai Stevenson's campaign during the 1952 presidential election was a Democrat.

McQueen, a senior at City College of New York in 1975, obtained a bachelor's degree in political science.

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Career

McQueen was appearing as a student in the Broadway comedy What a Life in 1938 when she was spotted by Kay Brown, talent scout for David O. Selznick, then in pre-production for Gone With the Wind (eventually released in 1939). Brown recommended that McQueen audition for the film. After Selznick saw her screen test, he never considered anyone else and McQueen was cast in the role that would become her most identifiable – "Prissy", a simple-minded house maid. She uttered the famous words: "Oh, Miss Scarlett! I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!" Her distinctive, high-pitched voice was described by a critic as "the itsy-little voice fading over the far horizon of comprehension". While the role is well known to audiences, McQueen did not enjoy playing the part and felt it was demeaning to African-Americans.

She had an uncredited bit part as a sales assistant in The Women (1939), filmed after Gone with the Wind but released before it. She also played Butterfly, Rochester's niece and Mary Livingstone's maid, in Jack Benny's radio program in the 1940s. She appeared in an uncredited role in Mildred Pierce (1945) and played a supporting role in Duel in the Sun (1946). By 1947, she had grown tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her film career. During World War II, McQueen frequently appeared as a comedian on the Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast Jubilee. Many of these broadcasts are available on the Internet Archive.

From 1950 until 1952, she was featured (and briefly reunited with fellow Gone With the Wind actor Hattie McDaniel, who appeared in the first six episodes before withdrawing due to illness) in another racially stereotyped role on the television series Beulah, in which she played Beulah's friend Oriole, a character originated on radio by Ruby Dandridge, who took over the TV role from McQueen in 1952–53. In a lighter moment, she appeared in a 1969 episode of The Dating Game.

McQueen was in the original version of the stage musical The Wiz when it debuted in Baltimore, Maryland in 1974. She played the Queen of the Field Mice, a character from the original L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, when the show was revised prior to going to Broadway, McQueen's role was cut by incoming director Geoffrey Holder.

Offers for acting roles began to dry up around this time, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including political study. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from City College of New York in 1975. McQueen played the character of Aunt Thelma, a fairy godmother, in the ABC Weekend Special episode "The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody" (1978) and the ABC Afterschool Special episode "Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid" (1979); her performance in the latter earned her a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming. Her final feature film role was in The Mosquito Coast (1986). Her final appearance was in the TV movie Polly, a reimagining of the Pollyanna story with a Black cast.

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