Dorothy Dandridge, Part 2: Hollywood's First Black Leading Lady — Island in the Sun, Porgy and Bess, and the Promise Hollywood Couldn't Keep
About this episode
This episode explores the challenges faced by Dorothy Dandridge after her historic Oscar nomination and her struggle for leading roles in Hollywood.
By 1955, Dorothy Dandridge had done what Hollywood once seemed determined to make impossible — become a genuine leading lady, carry a major studio picture, and earn a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards. But after Carmen Jones , the breakthrough Hollywood celebrated would become a career it had no idea how to sustain. Part 2 of our two-part series on Dorothy Dandridge begins on Oscar night in 1955, with Dandridge seated alongside Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, and Jane Wyman as the first Black woman ever nominated for Best Actress. A new contract with Twentieth Century-Fox seemed to promise that Carmen Jones was only the beginning. Instead, leading roles disappeared, major projects stalled, and Dandridge found herself caught inside an industry willing to celebrate a Black star but still deeply uncomfortable building films around one. The episode follows Dandridge through the years that followed — from becoming the first Black performer to headline the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room and her increasingly complicated relationship with director Otto Preminger, to Island in the Sun , the controversial interracial romance that provoked bans, protests, and Ku Klux…
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