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| Birth Name(s) : Dorothy Jean Dandridge |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
Harold Nicholas (1942-1951) |
| Profession:
N/A |
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Full Dorothy Dandridge Biography
Dandridge's mother, Ruby Dandridge, was an ambitious, small-time local performer who would become a successful stage and screen actress. She created an act for her two young daughters, Vivian and Dorothy, under the name of The Wonder Children which toured in the South for five years supervised by Ruby's lesbian partner, Geneva Williams, while Ruby worked and performed in Cleveland Ohio. Biographies on Dandridge document this period as the beginning of Dorothy's sexual abuse by Williams. During this time they toured non-stop, and Dorothy rarely attended school.
With the start of the Great Depression, work dried up, as it did for many of the Chitlin' circuit performers. Ruby Dandridge moved to Hollywood where she found steady work playing domestics in small parts on radio and film. During this time, Geneva continued to train and rehearse the girls who were renamed "The Dandridge Sisters" and booked into such venues as The Cotton Club and The Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York. Dorothy's first on-screen appearance had been a bit part in a 1935 Our Gang short; in 1937 she appeared in the Marx Brothers feature A Day at the Races, singing a solo in the production number "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm." in her authobiography Everthing and Nothing, Dorothy claimed she had Mexican, British, African american and Native American roots in her family.
Dandridge married well-known dancer and entertainer Harold Nicholas on September 6, 1942 and gave birth to her only child, Harolyn Suzanne Nicholas on September 2, 1943. Harolyn was born brain damaged with no remedy to be found, and the couple divorced in October 1951. Dandridge became romantically involved with Otto Preminger during the filming of Carmen Jones, an affair which lasted four years. Controlling and possessive, he advised her not to sign a contract for four films which had been offered to her and which would have built on the acclaim she had garnered as Carmen, thereby sabotaging her career. (During this period, she was under serious consideration for the featured role of Tuptim in the 1956 production of The King and I; the reasons for her not being cast are not known.) She ended the affair upon realization that Preminger had no plans to leave his first wife to marry her.
By 1965 Earl Mills managed to get Dorothy bookings in Tokyo, the Mocambo in New York, and the New York Basin Street East, as well as two Mexican film roles. She also did a show in Puerto Rico, and another in New Mexico. All of the performances were sold out: she was back in the big picture. Her salary for both appearances was $10,000, plus $75,000 for the two films and a $20,000 advance for her autobiography.
Dandridge was one of the few Hollywood stars who answered a subpoena to testify at the 1957 criminal libel trial of Hollywood Research, Inc., the company which published all of the tabloid magazines of the era. She and actress Maureen O'Hara, the only other star who agreed to testify, were photographed shaking hands outside the downtown Los Angeles courtroom where the well-publicized trial was held. Testimony from O'Hara, as well as a disgruntled former magazine editor provoked giddy tension as it became clear that the magazines' fascination with casual sex had made them vulnerable to false information provided by hotel maids and clerks who were paid for stories. When the jury and press visited Grauman's Chinese Theatre to determine whether O'Hara could have performed various sexual acts while seated in the balcony as reported by the magazine - it was discovered that this would have been impossible - the result damaging to the tabloid press. Dandridge, however, contended with an even more serious allegation made against her when she took the witness stand.
Alleged by one tabloid to have fornicated in the woods of Lake Tahoe with a white bandleader in 1950, she reminded the court that racial segregation had confined her to her hotel room during her nightclub run in the Nevada resort city - she could have been arrested simply for leaving the hotel to buy food, cosmetics, or for any other reason. This proved beyond any doubt that the Hollywood Research company had committed libel at least once. The verdict curtailed invasive tabloid journalism until many years after Dandridge's death. She had done herself a favor, probably without realizing it, in that nobody took advantage of the ambiguous circumstances of her death when it was still fresh. There are no known photographs of the death scene or of the removal of her body from her West Hollywood, California apartment.
While those who have endured similar ordeals point out that Dandridge's devastating experience with having a brain-damaged child was probably the straw that broke her back emotionally, it's interesting to note that the actress openly discussed the issue of raising a mentally handicapped child on The Mike Douglas Show, videotaped in her hometown of Cleveland, in 1963. As is the case with nearly all TV talk shows from that era, the video and audio are gone, however a newspaper wire service report of Dandridge's remarks on the program survives.
She has a great niece that lives in Auburn Hills, Mi, that was a porn screen actress that went by the name Fantasy and bears a striking resemblence to her. Since then she has stop to pursue modeling and marriage. |
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