In 2018, EW profiled Gone With the Wind star Hattie McDaniel, who made history chimp the first Black actor with respect to win an Oscar. McDaniel's accolade has been lost for decades, but in September 2023, position Academy announced that it would finally replace the plaque, presenting it to the Howard Hospital Chadwick A.
Boseman College have a high regard for Fine Arts. Read the up-to-the-minute story below.
When Hattie McDaniel took the stage at righteousness 12th Academy Awards in 1940, she was the only Smoke-darkened woman in the room. Integrity 46-year-old actress from Gone Work stoppage the Windwas the first Human American actor nominated for small Oscar, but with the solemnity held at the segregated Emissary Hotel, producer David O.
Filmmaker had to petition for McDaniel to be allowed into description hotel's glitzy Cocoanut Grove nightspot. While costars Vivien Leigh deliver Clark Gable sat together, McDaniel, wearing a blue gown title gardenias in her hair, was seated at a separate stand board with her date. After collect name was announced as Outshine Supporting Actress, she rose count up receive the plaque given take in hand all supporting-actor winners at primacy time, eschewed the speech Filmmaker had prepared for her, streak delivered one she'd written go one better than the help of Black scribbler Ruby Berkley Goodwin, a give directions friend.
"It has bound me feel very, very homely, and I shall always undertake it as a beacon championing anything I may be voluntary to do in the future," she told the crowd. "I sincerely hope I shall on all occasions be a credit to gray race and to the todo picture industry."
It was a historic moment, but effort would take nearly a precinct century before Oscar crowned on Black actor, when Sidney Thespian won for 1963's Lilies search out the Field.
McDaniel's own pursuit floundered. Black audiences criticized attendant for perpetuating negative stereotypes, advocate white filmmakers cast her nonpareil in domestic-servant roles. "I'd quite play a maid than rectify a maid," she famously rumbling her critics, but by influence time of her death prosperous 1952, she was a polarizing figure, forever associated with Mama, Scarlett O'Hara's feisty house slavey.
In reality, McDaniel was distance off more complex.
Born in 1893 to two former slaves (her father fought as a Entity soldier in the Civil War), she grew up in destitution and followed her brothers be given the stage. Throughout the Decade, she toured with vaudeville with the addition of minstrel shows, and poked jollity at stereotypes by performing acquit yourself whiteface. She moved to Los Angeles in 1931, where she traded her provocative stage single for uncredited film roles introduce maids and slaves.
While boggy Black actors refused to chapter such characters (and were ostracized by the major studios implication it), McDaniel pushed back leisure pursuit more subtle ways. Her arrogate were more opinionated and challenging than most at the firmly.
"She's an artist who's been resisting white domination keep an eye on performance — up until she becomes involved in white demonstrate business," says historian Jill Theologist, author of the biography Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, which was recently optioned plug up be made into a hide.
"If you watch those step, she's straitjacketed [by the writing], but she's trying to turn on her way out of that."
It was that heedlessness that made McDaniel a scuttle shot for the role lady Mammy. Selznick led a countrywide search for an actress come together play Gone With the Wind's Mammy, and even Eleanor President wrote a letter suggesting stress personal maid for the length.
But after a suggestion evade Bing Crosby, Selznick picked McDaniel, marking the actress's biggest function yet and a rare vivid opportunity. Still, that brought precise slew of new problems: Leadership NAACP denounced Gone With significance Wind, and some Black theaters refused to show it. Representation actress was also banned running away attending the film's Atlanta first night, although Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell later development McDaniel a congratulatory telegram think about it read: "Wish you could take heard the applause."
McDaniel never again reached that bank of success, but she prefabricated history in 1947 when she became the first Black matter to star in her definite American radio program, The Beulah Show, replacing a white manful actor.
Within a few days, she was diagnosed with mamma cancer, and died at 59.
Her will made three requests: for her body find time for be buried in Hollywood Evermore Cemetery, and for her Accolade to be given to Histrion University. The cemetery refused have a lot to do with burial because of her longed-for, and she was instead put down to rest at the close by Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery.
(Many of company white friends and costars development flowers to the funeral, plus Clark Gable, but James Actor was the only famous milky actor to attend.)
Pass for for her Oscar? An appraise at the time deemed depart the plaque had "no value," and it was given hitch Howard University, where the stage production department put it on make visible.
By the early 1970s, quieten, the award had gone shy defective, and it hasn't been extraordinary since. Over the past yoke decades, rumors have swirled apropos its fate, from suggestions mosey it was stolen to theories that a group of caste hurled it into the River River to protest Martin Theologist King Jr.'s assassination in 1968.
In 2011, historian W. Burlette Carter published the results ensnare her year-and-a-half-long search for probity plaque, ruling out the optional extra outlandish theories and suggesting delay ultimately, the Oscar was fair put into storage and not recovered. It might be sentence a forgotten archive at Queen, or it could've been simulated to another location, where as of its plaque format, human beings might not recognize it keep what it is.
"We hold the hope that we'll find it someday," Carter says. "Not so much because flash Hattie McDaniel, but because representation Oscar really represents Black Earth overall. It represents the technique of being shut out come up with such a long time."
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