Singer and Actress, Lena Horne, Dead at 92
Posted May 10th 2010 06:47AM
Lena Horne dead Legendary jazz singer Lena Horne, who starred in 'Cabin in the
Sky' in 1943, died Sunday. She was 92. Horne died at New York-Presbyterian
Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release
any other details. Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.
Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley.
In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a
major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful
with a Hollywood contract. In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox
to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical 'Stormy
Weather.' Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature
piece.
"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I
wouldn't work for places that kept us out ... it was a damn fight everywhere I
was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she
said in Brian Lanker's book, 'I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who
Changed America.'
Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the
sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like 'The Lady Is a Tramp' and
'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.'
By the mid-1950s, Horne -- who in 1947 married composer and musical director
Lennie Hayton in a secret wedding in Paris, because interracial marriages were
illegal in California -- left Hollywood, "bitter," she said, "at the whole
Hollywood system," and went on to tremendous success as a stage actress and
consummate jazz singer, PEOPLE reports.
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of 'Jamaica' in 1957, reviewer
Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time."
Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs."
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights
movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly
Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington
when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech. Horne also spoke
at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just
days before his assassination.
In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered
icon of American popular music. Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, 'Lena Horne:
The Lady and Her Music,' won a special Tony Award.
Widowed in 1971, Horne moved to New York City and continued her stage and
concert work and even did the occasional movie role, including that of Diana
Ross's fairy godmother in the 1978 'The Wiz.'
Horne's other roles included 'I Dood It,' a Red Skelton comedy, 'Thousands
Cheer' and 'Swing Fever,' all in 1943; 'Broadway Rhythm' in 1944; and 'Ziegfeld
Follies' in 1946.
as for me i was not a big fan of Lena Horne but i surely loved her last Movie she
played in the Movie called The Wiz starring Diana Ross back in 1978.
Over all i respected in for what she did back in her day
“My Father is at work until now, so I am at work”
ReplyDelete(John 5:17)
“I bless you my children! Today I wish to speak to you about God’s work in these times and about the general picture in which your life and your mission is inserted.
“Try to understand, above all, that you did not happen to be in the reality in which you are by accident, but you are here because of a precise divine project. Whatever you might think about yourselves or others might think about you, know that your life is precious and irreplaceable in the time and place in which you find yourselves to be, according to God’s projects. You have been preordained for this reality, and for this reason God gave you irreplaceable and original potentialities. No one in the universe is equal to you, because God’s creativity is unlimited and inexhaustable, and because each one of you is absolutely unique in his being and in his way of acting.
“Unfortunatly, many on Earth live below their potentiality, because they do not make of themselves a gift to Me. I am the only One to know pefectly the Father’s project for each one of you, because from Him I received the order to bring to completion His work in every person. I am acting in you by the power of the Holy Spirit, who enlightens you, cloaks you, constantly inspires you pointing out the avenue towards Me, so that I might reveal to you the Will of the Father for each one of you.
Without me you shall never truly be able to know yourselves, nor to be able to understand what is asked of you to do in this life.
“The Holy Spirit and I are constantely at work in order to realize the Father’s project in each one of you, but we can do this only with the help of your freedom, that is, only when you willingly and freely choose to love and serve God and you offer to Him your life. This is the indispensable condition so that your potentialities activate and are at work. In fact, by the moment you decide to live for God and to be totally abandoned to His will, within you the action of the Holy Trinity starts working, and little by little, transforms your life and your thoughts. Thus, you are beginning to become conscious of who you are in God and to make a mark on reality, a creative mark, because it is divine creativity working in you. I wish you to be conscious about what I am saying to you, because the knowledge that God is active in you, independently from your human limitations and frailties, is determinant for your mission in the time in which you live.
“Yours is a grand time and a difficult time for the entire universe. Grandiose for the power of the events that the hand of God is preparing, and difficult because it is a time of battle with the powers of evil, an always more open battle.
All this does not refer to the planet earth alone, but to the entire creation and all the people who inhabit many other planets. I have already told you that they are children of God as you are, and that I gave My life for them as well. They are your brothers in whom the project of My Father has to be perfectly accomplished, just as it is in yours.
“What is the project of the Father? To bring back the entire creation to the state of integrity and perfection it had before original sin; to bring back every person to the dignity and glory of a child of God. All men and every creature that exists in the universe must be made free from corruption and death which infiltrated themselves in the work of God because of the sin of your forefathers. Humanity must return to a correct relationship with God, by recognizing His authority and by submitting to His guide. How is the Father going to realize this project? By recapitulating all creation in Me, since He gave Me all power in the whole universe.