Hattie McDaniel

At 57 years old, Hattie McDaniel has this physical status:

Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1893 – October 26, 1952) was an American actress, producer, and comedian.

She is best known for her role in Gone with the Wind (1939), for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first black entertainer to win the first Oscar. McDaniel, who appeared in many films, also appeared on 16 blues sides from 1926 to 1929; she was the first black woman to perform on radio in the United States.

She appeared in over 300 films, but only for her 83.McDaniel has two actresses on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood: one on 6933 Hollywood Boulevard for her contributions to radio and the other on 1719 Vine Street for acting in motion pictures.

In 1975, she was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, and in 2006, she became the first black Oscar winner to be honoured with a US postage stamp.

She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2010 for her contributions.

Early life

McDaniel, the youngest of 13 children in Wichita, Kansas, was born in 1893 to formerly enslaved parents. Susan Holbert, a singer of gospel music, and her father, Henry McDaniel, served in the Civil War with the 122nd United States Colored Troops. 4 In 1900, the family migrated to Fort Collins, Colorado, then to Denver, Colorado.

Hattie attended Denver East High School (1908-19010). She entered "Convict Joe" in 1908, a contest sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, reciting "Convict Joe" later claiming she had won first place.

In the 1948 Three Stooges' short film Heavenly Daze, Sam McDaniel played the butler. Etta McDaniel, her sister, was also an actress.

Personal life

McDaniel married Howard Hickman in Denver, Colorado, on January 19, 1911. He died in 1915. George Langford, her second husband, died of a gunshot wound in January 1925, shortly after she married him, and although her career was on the rise.

On March 21, 1941 in Tucson, Arizona, she married James Lloyd Crawford, a real estate salesman. McDaniel joyfully admitted that she was pregnant in his book Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, according to Donald Bogle. McDaniel's mother started buying baby clothes and opened a nursery in her house. When she had a miscarriage and plunged into depression, her plans were shattered. She had no children at the time. After four and a half years of marriage, she divorced Crawford in 1945. Crawford had been apprehensive of her work, according to her.

Larry Williams, an interior decorator, married in Yuma, Arizona, on June 11, 1949, but she divorced him in 1950 after explaining that their five months together had been marred by "arguing and arguing." McDaniel burst into tears when she admitted that her husband attempted to spark indignation in the cast of her radio show and also interfered with her work. "I haven't gotten over it yet," she said. "I had so much to sleep that I couldn't sleep." "I couldn't concentrate on my lines."

She served as chairman of the Hollywood Victory Committee during World War II, providing entertainment for soldiers stationed at military bases. (The US military was segregated, and black entertainers were not allowed to serve on white entertainment committees.) Leigh Whipper, a friend, and other black entertainers were recruited to assist her in her committee. She appeared at numerous private hospitals, threw parties, and appeared at United Service Organizations (USO) shows and war bond rallies to raise funds to finance the war on behalf of the Victory Committee. Bette Davis was the only white member of McDaniel's black regiment to perform for black regiments; Lena Horne and Ethel Waters were among the others who attended. McDaniel was also a member of American Women's Voluntary Services.

Clarence Muse, one of the first black members of the Screen Actors Guild, appeared on NBC radio broadcast to raise funds for Red Cross relief services for Americans who had been affected by devastating floods, and she gained a reputation for kindness, serving money to neighbors and strangers alike.

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Career

McDaniel performed as both a composer and performer. She honed her songwriting abilities while assisting her brother Otis McDaniel's carnival company, which was a minstrel show. The McDaniel Sisters Company, founded in 1914 by McDaniel and her sister Etta Goff, which was an all-female minstrel exhibition. The troupe started losing money after her brother Otis' death in 1916, and Hattie did not get her next big break until 1920. Melody Hounds, a Black touring ensemble, appeared from 1920 to 1925. She began her radio career in the mid-1920s, performing with the Melody Hounds on Denver's station KOA. She recorded several of her songs for Okeh Records and Paraphrasedoutput in Chicago from 1926 to 1929. McDaniel conducted seven sessions, one in 1926 on the rare Kansas City brand Meritt; four sessions in Chicago for Okeh from late 1926 to late 1927 (out of ten sides recorded), and two sessions in Chicago for

McDaniel could only find work as a washroom attendant at Sam Pick's Club Madrid near Milwaukee after the 1929 stock market crashed in 1929. Despite the owner's refusal to allow her perform, she was eventually allowed to perform and quickly became a regular entertainer.

In 1931, McDaniel and her brother Sam, as well as her sisters Etta and Orlena, migrated to Los Angeles to join her brother Sam and sisters Etta and Orlena. When she couldn't afford film, she took up as a maid or cook. Sam was on a KNX radio show The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, and he was able to give his sister a spot. "Hi-Hat Hattie" a bossy maid who often "forgets her place," she said on radio. Her show was successful, but her income was so low she had to continue working as a maid. She made her first film appearance in The Golden West (1932), in which she played a maid. She made her second appearance in the highly acclaimed Mae West film I'm No Angel (1933), in which she appeared in one of the maids with whom West camped it up backstage. She appeared in choruses, or in other uncredited film roles in the early 1930s. McDaniel joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1934. She began to gain notice and gained more film roles, gaining her screen credits. Shirley Temple, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore appeared in The Little Colonel (1935), a Fox Film Corporation under contract to appear.

Judge Priest (1934), directed by John Ford and starring Will Rogers, was the first film in which she appeared in a major role. She appeared in the film and showcased her singing abilities, including a duet with Rogers. During filming, McDaniel and Rogers became friends. McDaniel appeared in Alice Adams in 1935 as a slovenly maid, as Jean Harlow's maid and traveling companion, and Béla Lugosi. She appeared in the 1938 film Vivacious Lady, starring James Stewart and Ginger Rogers. McDaniel appeared in the 1936 film Show Boat (Universal Pictures), starring Allan Jones and Irene Dunne, in which she sang a verse of Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man with Dunne, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, and a Black chorus. "I Still Suits Me," written for Kern and Hammerstein's film. She appeared in many films after Show Boat, including Jean Harlow and Clark Gable (1937), starring Margaret Sullavan; and The Mad Miss Manton (1938), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. She appeared in Nothing Sacred (1937), where she played the wife of a shoeshine man (Troy Brown) masquerading as a sultan.

Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland, and Clark Gable were among some of Hollywood's most popular celebrities, including Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Raymond Ferguson, Olivia de Havilland. In Gone with the Wind (1939), she appeared with de Havilland and Gable. Around this time, members of the Black community had chastised her for accepting and going for proactive rather than rocking the Hollywood boat. For example, she appeared in The Little Colonel (1935) as one of the servants wishing to return to the Old South, but RKO Pictures' Alice Adams' portrayal of Malena enraged white Southern audiences because she stole several scenes from Katharine Hepburn's film. McDaniel's most well-known role as a sassy, opinionated maid.

With the Wind, the competition for Mammy in Gone was almost as fierce as it was for Scarlett O'Hara. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to film director David O. Selznick to request that her own maid, Elizabeth McDuffie, be given the role. 151 McDaniel did not think she would be chosen because she had a reputation as a comedic actress. Clark Gable had requested that McDaniel be given the role; in any case, she arrived in an authentic maid's uniform and won the role.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought hard to get the film's producer and director to delete racial epithets (in particular the offensive slur "nigger") and to modify scenes that might be incendiary and that, in their view, were historically inaccurate. A scene from the book in which Black men assaulted Scarlett O'Hara after which the Ku Klux Klan, which has a long history of inciting terror on Black communities, is particularly troubling. 152-1791 Black men were lynched in South Africa due to false allegations that they had assaulted white people. The attack scene was changed, and some profane words were changed, but "darkie" was still in the film, and the film's message of slavery remained largely unchanged. The film's screenplay also referred to poor whites as "white garbage," and it attributed these terms to both black and white characters. 114, n. 40.

The Grand Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia, was chosen by the studio as the site for the Gone with the Wind's premiere on Friday, December 15, 1939. McDaniel's attendance was allowed, according to studio owner David O. Selznick, but MGM advised him not to attend due to Georgia's segregation laws. Clark Gable threatened to cancel the Atlanta premiere unless McDaniel were allowed to attend, but McDaniel persuaded him to attend anyway.

The majority of Atlanta's 300,000 residents gathered along the seven-mile (11 km) motorcade that carried the film's other actors and executives from the airport to the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where they remained. Although Jim Crow barred McDaniel from the Atlanta premiere, she did attend the film's premiere on December 28, 1939. Selznick's image was also prominently featured in the series, despite Selznick's insistence.

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Reception and 1939 Academy Awards

Scarlett O'Hara, the first Black actress to have been nominated and win an Academy Award, and she scoffs at Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). When speaking to the white press about the character, McDaniel said, "I loved Mammy." "I think I knew her because my own grandmother worked on a plantation not unlike Tara." There were allegations that her white owners were too "familiar" in the film; she had alarmed some whites in the South; others had been disarmed; some whites had been chastised. At least one writer pointed out that McDaniel's character did not differ from Mammy's book's, and that, in both the film and the book, the much younger Scarlett speaks to Mammy's family (dead or alive), her own name (if present or dead), or her desire to have anything other than a life in Tara, where she was a slave plantation. 114, n. 40, n. 47. 115, n. 47. And, although Mammy scolds the younger Scarlett, she never crosses Mrs. O'Hara, the household's most senior white woman, never crosses him. 114, p. 115, n. 47 Some commentators felt that McDaniel not only accepted the roles but also in her public remarks encouraged Hollywood to indulge in Hollywood's myths, fueling those who were campaigning for Black civil rights. 114, n. 40, p. 115, n. 47 Later, when McDaniel attempted to bring her "Mammy" character to a road show, Black audiences were not interested.

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Although many Black people were ecstatic about McDaniel's personal victory, they also found the occasion bittersweet. They believed Gone With the Wind celebrated the slave system and chastised the powers that destroyed it. 199–20, n. 40. The unusual award for them was that only those who did not protest Hollywood's systemic use of racial stereotypes would be able to find work and success there. 199–20, n. 40.

The Twelfth Academy Awards were held at the Ambassador Hotel's Coconut Grove restaurant in Los Angeles. A banquet was held in the same room. Louella Parsons, an American gossip columnist, wrote about Oscar Night on February 29, 1940: A flurry of events.

McDaniel was given a plaque-style Oscar, approximately 5.5 in (14 cm) by 6 in (15 cm), the type given to all Best Supporting Actors and Actresses at the time. She and her escort were required to sit at a segregated table for two at the far wall of the room's far wall; her white agent, William Meiklejohn, sat at the same table. The hotel had a stringent no-Blacks policy but McDaniel was allowed to enter as a favor. After the award ceremony, as well as her white co-stars, went to a "no-Blacks" club, where McDaniel was still refusing admission. Another Black woman did not win an Oscar for the first time in 50 years, with Whoopi Goldberg winning Best Support Actress for her role in Ghost. There was also more controversy weeks before McDaniel was selected for her Oscar. On the posters advertising the film in the South, David Selznick, the film maker, omitted the faces of all the Black actors. None of the Black cast members was allowed to attend the premiere of the film.

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Gone with the Wind received eight Academy Awards. It was later ranked number four in the top 100 American films of all time in the 1998 survey and number six in the 2007 rankings.

McDaniel played a domestic in the Warner Bros. film In This Our Life (1942), starring Bette Davis and directed by John Huston, but she is wrongly accused of murderer when her son, a law student, is wrongly accused of manslaughter. With Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis, McDaniel appeared in the same studio as Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943). McDaniel was a comedic relief in an otherwise "grim study," Time wrote about the film in its review. "Hattie McDaniel, whose bubbling, blazing good humor more than redeems the Harlem number's roaring bad image of Ice Cold Katie." McDaniel continued to perform maids in Warner's The Male Animal (1942) and United Artists' Since You Went Away (1944), but her feistiness was toned down to reflect the times' somber news. She also appeared on "Aunt Tempy," a maid in Disney's Song of the South (1946).

She appeared on the live CBS television show The Ed Wynn Show in Mickey (1948) and Family Honeymoon (1949), the latter year she appeared on Mickey (1948) and Family Honeymoon (1949). In her remaining years, she appeared on radio and television, becoming the first black actor to appear in her own radio program with the comedy series Beulah. She appeared on the television version of the series, assassinating Ethel Waters after the first season. Waters had reportedly expressed reservations about stereotypes in the position.) Beulah was a hit, earning McDaniel $2,000 per week; however, the performance was not a success; however, the film was controversial. The United States Army stopped broadcasting Beulah in Asia in 1951 because troops complained that the show perpetuated negative stereotypes of black men as shiftless and lazy, and interfered with black troops' ability to carry out their mission. McDaniel discovered breast cancer after filming a few episodes. Louise Beavers replaced her in 1952 after she was too ill to work and was banished from work.

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