Harry Belafonte, activist singer and Coup de l’escalade actor, has died

Harry Belafonte died on Tuesday New York Times. A devoted singer and civil rights activist, he was 96.

its beginning

Harold George Belafonte Jr., known as Harry Belafonte, a golden youth under the Jamaican sun, has returned to live in New York. After watching the play The main hunter At the American Black Theater, he joined German director Erwin Piscator’s drama course at the Dramatic Workshop of the School of Social Research, where he studied with Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis.

Along with his singing career, which began under the guidance of Monty Kay, Belafonte devotes his free time to humanitarian and peaceful causes, especially the fight for equal civil rights, where he strongly invests himself, especially with Martin Luther King.

Also on the screen

This commitment to humanitarian work can be found in his cinematic choices, especially in his denunciation of discrimination. His first film role was in The Shining Path (1953) as a college principal who struggles with a particularly scheming student whom he tries to get the best of.

There he met the actress and dancer Dorothy Dandridge, with whom he collaborated in his next two films, Carmen Jones, directed by Otto Preminger and adapted from Bizet, then Une île au soleil, in which he played a young politician courting a wealthy planter. white.

After starring in The Last Black Survivor of Humanity, Flesh and the Devil and Robber for Robert Wise (Staircase Flip), he stars in the first realization of Sidney Poitier, Buck and his accomplice, who tells the story. The story of a group of freed slaves trying to move to Colorado. The two men would meet again in 1974 in another film directed by Poitier, the raunchy comedy Uptown Saturday Night.

In Grambling’s The White Tiger in 1981 and The White Man in 1996, it unfolds at the heart of an inverted racial system: it is blacks who willingly degrade whites, and the latter are portrayed as poor and exploited in Desmond Nakano’s film. Discrimination changes sides, but not forms, and there is always a determined fight against it.

Meanwhile, he also made cameos with Robert Altman in The Player and Prêt-à-porter before landing a major role in Kansas City in 1996. She returned to the big screen for two final appearances: a small role in Bobby d. Emilio Estevez in 2006 and Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman in 2018.