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Gail Lumet Buckley

May 10, 2010 by · Comments Off on Gail Lumet Buckley 

Gail Lumet BuckleyGail Lumet Buckley:The majesty and magic that was Lena Horne passed away yesterday, but the legend is forever. Beauty and glamor Horne made it difficult to sing for a while to be fully appreciated, but when she died at 92 in New York, no doubt it was a woman for all ages.

Horne hated singing in clubs, which were segregated thought the “40 and 50, but his intensity and ability to riveting, not to mention their glamor, became an icon before she brought him a solo exhibition at the Broadway triumph and told the story of his life in words and music.

Horne met once, for an interview with her daughter Gail Lumet Buckley, who by then was divorced from director Sidney Lumet. Lena had appeared in the adaptation of the miserable Lumet “The Wiz” with Michael Jackson as the Good Witch. The couple’s daughter Jenny wrote the hit 2008 movie with Anne Hathaway, “Rachel Getting Married.” However, Gail had written a history of his family and at the end of the interview when asked if they wanted to sign the book, Lena wrote, “Gail’s mother.” She was respectful, not wanting to overshadow the achievement of their daughter, but willing to do press to bring the book to the attention it deserves. Of course, she was immensely charming and funny. Farewell, mother of Gail. Perhaps it is fitting somehow left us Mother’s Day.

Lena Horne Died

May 10, 2010 by · Comments Off on Lena Horne Died 

Lena Horne DiedLena Horne Died:NEW YORK – Lena Horne, the jazz singer and actress who reviled the lovely fanaticism that enabled him to entertain the target audience, but do not socialize with them, reducing their rise to stardom on Broadway, has died. She was 92.

Horne died Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin did not release any other details.

Horne, whose striking beauty and sex appeal often overshadowed magnetic sensual voice was very frank about the reason behind its success.

“I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people can accept,” he once said. “I was his dream. I had the worst kind of acceptance, since it was never as cool or what was contributed. It was because of the way it looked.”

In the 1940s, was one of the performers first black to sing with a white stripe top, the first to play the Copacabana club and among a handful of Hollywood with a contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the film all-black musical “Stormy Weather.” Her portrayal of the title song became a hit and his signature piece.

On screen, in the records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home with a wide range vocal music, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart songs as “The Lady Is a Tramp ‘and’ Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. ”

In his first major Broadway success as the star of “Jamaica” in 1957, Richard Watts Jr. reviewer called “one of the incomparable performers of our time.” Buddy de Sylva author dubbed her “the best female singer of songs.”

But Horne is perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.

“I was always fighting the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I do not work for places that kept us out. … It was a bloody fight wherever he was, all the places I worked in New York, in Hollywood, everybody, “said Brian’s book Lanka” I Dream in Spain: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America. ”

While at MGM, he starred in the all-black “Cabin in the Sky” in 1943, but in most of his other films, she appeared only in the musical numbers could be cut in the South racially insensitive without affecting history. These include “I Dood It”, a comedy of Red Skelton, “Thousands Cheer” and “Swing Fever”, all in 1943, “Broadway Rhythm” in 1944, and “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1946.

“Cowardice Metro deprived the music of one of the great singing actresses, film historian John Kobal wrote.

Early in his career in a style outside Horne out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman can not reach the public and therefore can not hurt,” he once said.

Then he embraced activism has sparked as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of his life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.

His 1981 Broadway one woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and her music,” won a special Tony Award. In it, the singer 64 years old, used two versions – one straight and one heartbreaking – of “Stormy Weather” to give the public a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of his career five decades.

A wild sometimes critical, John Simon, wrote that it was “steel, hardened and without age … as the clay, crystal annealing, life has carved, polished and refined it.”

When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the Oscar for best actress in 2002, she sobbed: “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. … It is for every woman no name, no face color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened. ”

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, a family of leadership in the black bourgeoisie. His daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in his 1986 book “The Hornes: An American Family” among his family was a college sweetheart of the WEB Du Bois and black to a consultant Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Leaving school at 16 to support his sick mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the legendary Harlem night place where artists were black and white clientele.

He left the club in 1935 toured with the orchestra Sissle Noble, billed as Helena Horne’s, continued to use the name when he joined Charlie Barnet’s orchestra in 1940 white.

An offer from MGM films came when he headed a show at the nightclub with dancers Little Troc Katherine Dunham in 1942.

Its success led some to accuse blacks Horne of trying to “pass” in a white world with his fair complexion. Max Factor even developed an “Egyptian” shadow special makeup budding actress while she was at MGM.

But in his book “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: a pictorial history of film musicals,” wrote Kobal that she refused to go along with the efforts of the study is portrayed as an exotic species of Latin America.

“They need not be an imitation of a white woman such Hollywood hoped that I had become,” Horne said once. “I am me, and I’m like anyone else.”

Horne was only 2 when his grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was included in the NAACP. But he avoided activism until 1945 when he was entertaining in an army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting in front while the black American soldiers were sent to the rear.

That crucial moment channeled his anger into something useful.

She became involved in various social and political organizations – along with his friendship with Paul Robeson – got its name on a blacklist during the McCarthy era red-hunting.

In the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racist remark at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and in 1963 to join another 250,000 in March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream.” Horne also spoke at a rally in that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, a few days before his assassination.

It was also during the ’60s that put out an autobiography, “Lena” with author Richard Schickel.

The next decade was a low point first, then a fresh outburst of art.

He was married to MGM’s musical director Lennie Hayton, a white man in Paris in 1947 after his first performance outside of the commitments in France and England. A previous marriage to Louis J. Jones ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and son, Teddy.

In the biography, 2009 “Stormy Weather”, the author James Gavin Horne writes that when asked about love, why he had married a white man, she replied: “To get back at him.”

His father, his son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the singer herself desolate isolation, refusing to do or even see anyone but their closest friends. One of them, the comedian Alan King, took months to convince his comeback, with results that surprised her.

“I looked and saw a family of brothers and sisters,” he said. “It’s been a long time, but when it was really started living.”

And he discovered that the time had softened its bitterness.

“It would change my life for nothing”, he said, “because being black made me understand.”

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