Donald Bogle – författare

Available once again, the definitive biography of the pioneering Black performer—the first nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award—who broke new ground in Hollywood and helped transform American society in the years before Civil Rights movement—a remarkable woman of her time who also transcended it.“An ambitious, rigorously researched account of the long-ignored film star and chanteuse. . . . Bogle has fashioned a resonant history of a bygone era in Hollywood and passionately documented the contribution of one of its most dazzling and complex performers."—New York Times Book ReviewIn the segregated world of 1950s America, few celebrities were as talented, beautiful, glamorous, and ultimately influential as Dorothy Dandridge. Universally admired, she was Hollywood's first full-fledged Black movie star. Film historian Donald Bogle offers a panoramic portrait of Dorothy Dandridge’s extraordinary and ultimately tragic life and career, from her early years as a child performer in Cleveland, to her rise as a nightclub headliner and movie star, to her heartbreaking death at 42.Bogle reveals how this exceptionally talented and intensely ambitious entertainer broke down racial barriers by integrating some of America's hottest nightclubs and broke through Tinseltown’s glass ceiling. Along with her smash appearances at venues such as Harlem’s famed Cotton Club, Dorothy starred in numerous films, making history with her role in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, playing opposite Harry Belafonte. Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress—the first Oscar nod for a woman of color.But Dorothy’s wealth, fame, and success masked a reality fraught with contradiction and illusion. Struggling to find good roles professionally, uncomfortable with her image as a sex goddess, coping with the aftermath of two unhappy marriages and a string of unfulfilling affairs, and overwhelmed with guilt for her disabled daughter, Dorothy found herself emotionally and financially bankrupt—despair that ended in her untimely death.Woven from extensive research and unique interviews, as magnetic as the woman at its heart, Dorothy Dandridge captures this dazzling entertainer in all her complexity: her strength and vulnerability, her joy and her pain, her trials and her triumphs.

From Donald Bogle, the award-winning author of Hollywood Black and leading authority on Black cinema history, this is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive and lavish biography of Hollywood's first African American movie goddess.Lena Horne's life and career are truly remarkable in American film history. She was the first Black performer to become a true star-to receive the kind of glamour treatment at the fabled MGM that the studio had previously given to the likes of Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner. At the same time, Horne dealt with endless indignities, not the least of which was the fact that her roles in films was often as a musical performer, which allowed her numbers to be easily stripped out of films without affecting the narrative when played to audiences that would find her presence undesirable.At long last, Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed gives the star her due. Through a highly informed and insightful narrative based on interviews, press accounts, studio archives, and decades of research, the book sheds new light on the star's compelling life and complicated career: her activism; her accomplishments and heady triumphs in movies, television, and nightclubs as she broke down long-standing barriers for Black individuals-especially Black women-and her solemn, sometimes bitter disappointments, both professional and personal. Illustrated by hundreds of photos (some published for the first time), this is the ultimate book on the icon.

The films, the stars, the filmmakers-all get their due in Hollywood Black, a sweeping overview of black people in film from the silent era through Black Panther, with striking photos and an engrossing history by award-winning author Donald Bogle.The story opens in the silent film era, when white actors in blackface played black characters and D. W. Griffith premiered his shocking, controversial The Birth of a Nation. Sound motion pictures were ushered in by Al Jolson in blackface in The Jazz Singer, but in this new era of filmmaking, black performers such as Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Paul Robeson began finding a place in Hollywood. More often than not, they were saddled with rigidly stereotyped roles, but some gifted performers were able to turn in significant performances, notably Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind (1939).In the coming decades, more black talents would light up the screen. Dorothy Dandridge became the first African American to earn a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Carmen Jones (1954), and Sidney Poitier broke ground in films like 1963's Lilies of the Field, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar. Hollywood Black reveals the changes in images that came about with the evolving social and political atmosphere of the country, from the Civil Rights era to the Black Power movement. The story takes readers through the Blaxploitation era with movies like Shaftand Super Fly, to the emergence of such stars as Diana Ross and Eddie Murphy, and of directors Spike Lee and John Singleton. The history comes to modern times with filmmakers Steve McQueen (Twelve Years a Slave) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight); megastars Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Halle Berry; and a glorious gallery of others.Filled with photographs and stories of stars and filmmakers on set and off, Hollywood Black tells an enthralling, underappreciated history as it's never before been told.

This classic iconic study of black images in American motion pictures has been updated and revised, as Donald Bogle continues to enlighten us with his historical and social reflections on the relationship between African Americans and Hollywood. He notes the remarkable shifts that have come about in the new millennium when such filmmakers as Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) examined America’s turbulent racial history and the particular dilemma of black actresses in Hollywood, including Halle Berry, Lupita Nyong’o, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Hudson, and Viola Davis. Bogle also looks at the ongoing careers of such stars as Denzel Washington and Will Smith and such directors as Spike Lee and John Singleton, observing that questions of diversity in the film industry continue. From The Birth of a Nation, the 1934 Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, and Carmen Jones to Shaft, Do the Right Thing, and Boyz N the Hood to Training Day, Dreamgirls, The Help, Django Unchained, and Straight Outta Compton, Donald Bogle compellingly reveals the way in which the images of blacks in American movies have significantly changed—and also the shocking way in which those images have often remained the same.