Harry Belafonte Dies: Singer, Actor & Activist Was 96

Martin Holmes April 25, 2023, 10:35 am

Harry Belafonte, the three-time Grammy-winning Caribbean-American pop star and Carmen Jones actor, has died. He was 96.

According to the New York Times, Belafonte passed away Tuesday, April 25, at his home in Manhattan. The singer’s longtime spokesperson, Ken Sunshine, confirmed the cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Born on March 1, 1927, in New York City, Belafonte started his music career in the 1940s, performing as a club singer in NYC to pay for acting classes. He helped ignite the craze for Caribbean music with his breakthrough 1956 album Calypso, which featured the hit records “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell” and spent 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard album chart. He went on to release five more Top 5 albums.

Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge in 'Carmen Jones'

Everett Collection

His success as a singer led to movie roles, with Belafonte becoming the first Black actor to achieve major success as a Hollywood leading man. He also became the first Black performer to win an Emmy for his 1959 special Tonight With Belafonte. His part in the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson’s Almanac also earned him a Tony Award in 1954.

Belafonte’s first film role was in Bright Road (1953), in which he supported female lead, Dorothy Dandridge. The pair also starred in Otto Preminger‘s hit musical Carmen Jones (1954).

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He returned to movie work in the mid-1990s, appearing opposite John Travolta in White Man’s Burden (1995) and in Robert Altman’s jazz age drama Kansas City (1996). He also played an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in the TV drama Swing Vote (1999).

In more recent years, Belafonte appeared in Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman (2018) as an elderly civil rights pioneer.

Belafonte was also committed to civil rights off-screen and was a key voice in the 1960s civil rights movement, being a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 2005, he founded The Gathering for Justice, which aims to end child incarceration and eliminate the racial inequities that permeate the justice system.