Dorothy Dandridge: biographer Donald Bogle interviewed on her stardom and legacy

With a season celebrating Dorothy Dandridge opening at BFI Southbank, her biographer talks about the trail-blazing Black Hollywood actress whom Whitney Houston once called ”our Marilyn Monroe”.

Island in the Sun (1957)

Dorothy Dandridge got her start in Hollywood in the 1940s at a time when there was new public awareness of the need for better roles for Black actors. She was outstanding in many brief roles in movies during that decade, before breaking out in lead performances in the 1950s in Bright Road (1953) and Carmen Jones (1954), both with Harry Belafonte. 

Dandridge was the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar – for Carmen Jones – an award that Halle Berry won almost 50 years later for Monster’s Ball (2001). Berry, who had played Dandridge in a 1999 HBO biopic, dedicated the win to her; Berry remains the only Black woman to have won that award.

Donald Bogle is an eminent scholar of classic film, particularly Black Hollywood history. His 1997 biography was key to a revival of interest in Dandridge. With Re-Introducing Dorothy Dandridge: The Cool Flame at the BFI in July, strand programmer Miriam Bale spoke with Bogle about public perception of Dandridge, how her own personal tragedies fueled her determination and artistry, and how industry racism led to limitations in her career. 

Miriam Bale: Early in your career you worked as a researcher with the director of Carmen Jones, Otto Preminger.

Donald Bogle: I worked for Preminger when he was nearing the end of his career. I read manuscripts and saw plays, and did reports on them, looking for a project for him to do. And I remember my very first day there, he said to me, “Do you have any questions?” And I said, “Can you tell me about Dorothy Dandridge?” He was taken aback. And the first thing he said, not prompted, was he was convinced that she had taken her own life. Later, when I was working on my first book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks [1973], I wrote to him for an interview, which he granted. He was really forthcoming. He never said to me that they had been lovers, but I knew it because I’d already talked to other people. I felt he cared about her.

Dandridge had about a three-year break after her big launch in Carmen Jones, when Preminger suggested she not take supporting roles.

Otto was a very shrewd, knowledgeable man. But Preminger did not really understand the racial attitudes, the racism within the industry. He didn’t understand that there was not going to be this support system within the industry that would keep her going.

Dorothy Dandridge in a publicity shot for Carmen Jones (1954)

So do you think, in the end, that was bad advice?

Frankly, I think what he told her was true, that if she had taken the supporting roles, that’s what she would end up doing. And he just felt it would have been a waste. She would have had a different kind of career. Look at Rita Moreno from West Side Story [1961]. She won a supporting Oscar and didn’t have the kind of career she should have had. But now we see her [aged 93], and it’s funny, she’s working. Maybe I should say your question can’t be answered. But I think he had a point.

I found an interview with Whitney Houston from 1996, just before your biography on Dandridge was published. They asked what’s next for her, and she said that she had the rights for the Dorothy Dandridge story, and said: “She was our Marilyn Monroe, and no one seems to care.” At the time, was Dorothy fairly forgotten?

When I began working on the book, the mainstream had, in a sense, wiped her from history. And that compelled me even more, so people would know about her. The telling thing about Dorothy is that within the African American community there was an oral tradition where people who had seen her, talked about her. I had heard my parents talk about her. And when the book was about to come out, Bruce Goldstein, of Film Forum in New York, and I put on a retrospective of Dorothy. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote about it. That was quite gratifying, to see Dorothy get that kind of attention.

Donald BogleBeowulf Sheehan

Can you talk a little bit about how Black Hollywood was changing rapidly during Dandridge’s film career in the 1940s and 50s?

There was this momentum that started when Black soldiers were going abroad to fight for freedom, the freedoms of others. And what freedoms were they still lacking in their own home? Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, visits Hollywood and meets with the industry leaders who will meet with him, and he’s asking for change in the depiction of African Americans. He’s asking for the ‘negro’ to be shown as a normal human being. He also mentions other minorities, Native Americans and Latinos. So the war raises a consciousness and the Black press starts to talk. Then, after the war, those Black GIs are returning to America. That is the pre-dawning of the civil rights movement. Hollywood begins to see it had depicted Blacks primarily as comic servants.

Then, in 1949, you get the four Black “problem pictures” [films examining race relations]. You get Home of the Brave, Intruder in the Dust, Lost Boundaries and Pinky. And in these films race is the thing, or the ‘race problem’. And the films get attention, and the films make money, particularly Pinky. So these are all the things that come about that influence Hollywood’s decisions, but not enough. Dorothy is still struggling to find work.

Then, in the 50s, when Dorothy and Sidney Poitier are coming to prominence, the civil rights movement is starting. The Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, that’s a real shift. The audience wanted films that address social, racial, political issues. And that helped Poitier. In some respects, it may have hurt Dorothy. Dorothy had a natural sensuality. Poitier’s sexuality was often sort of muted or neutralised in films, an aspect of him that the movies ignore.

Returning to what Houston said about her as “our Monroe”, how do you see Dandridge as different from Monroe, both on screen and off?

Well, the two were friends. They studied at The Actor’s Lab in Los Angeles, a very progressive acting school. And they were both serious about acting. It’s significant that Dorothy got that Oscar nomination for a film in 1954. And Marilyn, she was successful, but you look at Dorothy’s roles, the characters are more realistic. This was a source of her great discontent for Monroe. Marilyn was, frankly, a brilliant comedian. But she wanted to play more realistic characters, sort of what she does play later in The Misfits [1961]. You know, when they say she was the ‘Black Marilyn’, it’s to elevate her, but she’s Dorothy Dandridge and Marilyn is Marilyn Monroe.

The thing with people like Dorothy, Marilyn, Elizabeth Taylor, they compel our attention foremost because of who they are on the screen, but they also leave us a legend that tells us something about women. It tells us something about female drive and female assertion and independence.

So, what I’m saying here is that their legends, their personas on screen and off, say something to us. That’s the same thing with Dorothy. So these are the things with Dorothy that distinguish her from Marilyn Monroe, because you have these other things coming into her story. Again, race comes into it, and we don’t want to deny that.

Taylor and Monroe had to deal with the pressure of that sexualisation. Dorothy had the added pressure of race.

Yes. Dorothy had the added pressure of race. When you see her in Island in the Sun, there’s a scene where you’re ready for the big kiss [with white actor John Justin] and it doesn’t come. The studio didn’t want them to kiss, and they didn’t want him to say he loved her. She did not like confrontation, but she confronted the studio on Island in the Sun. And Justin supported her in this. They made some changes, but when they should have a passionate kiss, they rub cheeks. 

Years after Dorothy’s death, Darryl F. Zanuck, who produced it, conceded, without naming [her], that she had been right. He said it was a very compromised film and that they could have gone further with it. Because, even with its compromises, it was a success. There were problems in the South, but audiences were ready in 1957 for a bolder statement about interracial love.


Re-Introducing Dorothy Dandridge: The Cool Flame runs at BFI Southbank in July.