DIAHANN CARROLL,
1935-2019

Diahann Carroll, the pioneering television actress who died Friday at her home in West Hollywood, Calif., had a solid career as a singer and Broadway actress in the 1950s and 1960s.

The cause was complications of breast cancer, her publicist, Jeffrey Lane, told the New York Times. She was 84.

While known chiefly for Julia on NBC from 1968 to 1971, she sang on television, in nightclubs, on record and on Broadway, starting in her teen years and working into the 21st century.

Carroll started singing with the children’s choir of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem at the of 6. She entered singing contests as a teenager at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, winning on Chance of a Lifetime, which rewarded her with an engagement at the Latin Quarter nightclub.

She made her Broadway debut in 1954 in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical House of Flowers; her first album, for RCA in 1957, was a collection of Arlen songs such as “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Hit the Road to Dreamland” and “Come Rain Or Come Shine.”

She recorded the songs of Porgy and Bess with Andre Previn in 1959, the year she appeared in the big screen adaptation of the opera by George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward.

In 1962, she starred in Richard Rodgers’ musical No Strings, which he wrote for her, winning the Tony for Leading Actress in a Musical.

She recorded regularly up until she got the role on Julia, releasing Nobody See Me Cry on Columbia in 1966 and, after an eight-year break from the studio, a self-titled album for Motown in 1974.

Later in life, she played Norma Desmond in the Toronto production of Sunset Bouelvard and toured the U.S. in 2001 performing show tunes in Almost Like Being in Love: The Lerner and Loewe Songbook.