American actress, singer and model, who rose to prominence in some of the earliest major studio films to feature black casts, including Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959). In 1962, Carroll won a Tony Award for best actress, a first for a black woman, for her role in the Broadway musical No Strings.
Her 1968 debut in Julia, the first series on American television to star a black woman in a non-stereotypical role, was a milestone both in her career and the medium. In the 1980s she played the role of Dominique Deveraux, a mixed-race diva, in the prime time soap opera Dynasty. Carroll was the recipient of numerous stage and screen nominations and awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress In A Television Series in 1968. She received an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for the 1974 film Claudine.
The daughter of a subway conductor and a domestic servant, she spent one year of her childhood with an aunt when her parent’s circumstances became too difficult to keep her. The fear of abandonment and the insecurity of the change stayed with her all of her life. At age ten she won a scholarship to the Met for a month, giving her a glimpse of glorious possibilities. She changed her name at 16 for an audition for “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” She got the job and her career began.
At 19 she first came to prominence in Carmen Jones, followed by Porgy and Bess. On film she played every type of role from middle-class working woman on welfare to the glamorous schemer on TV’s prime time soap, Dynasty (1984-1987). Carroll had her own TV series, Julia (1968-1971), a two-year ground-breaking series about a black nurse.
Carroll’s domestic life was turbulent. She made a teen-age marriage in 1956 to agent Monte Kay, which produced her only child, her daughter Suzanne. She left Kay for a stormy nine-year affair with Sidney Poitier, whom she called “a black panther.” He too was married and stayed married during the duration of their liaison. She and Kay divorced in 1962 but remained good friends up to the time of his death in 1988.
In 1970, she began three intense and public years with David Frost, with whom she has remained “best friends.” When they separated, she married a Las Vegas businessman briefly, an episode that lasted for three months, until he beat her up.
Her third husband, a 24-year-old black journalist in 1975, much younger than she, was killed in a car accident two years later when he drove his Ferrari off a cliff.
After knowing Vic Damone for some 20 years, they were performing on the same bill in Palm Beach when they were simultaneously hit by Cupid’s thunderbolt on 18 April 1984, a date they refer to as their anniversary. A few months later, he proposed, and they married on 3 January 1987 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They separated in April 1991, and he filed for divorce on 11 September 1996 in Los Angeles, California.
In her 1986 autobiography, Diahann, Carroll reveals the dark side of her life, crisis love affairs and dangerous dependencies. She spent four torturous and cathartic years exploring her past.
During a routine medical visit on 11 May 1998, a lump was found in her breast which was removed in a lumpectomy three days later, followed by six radiation treatments. Feeling relieved and well, she prepared to tour the country promoting her new album, The Time of My Life. Carroll died of cancer on 4 October 2019 in Los Angeles, aged 84.
Link to Wikipedia biography