Dorothy dandridge biography daughter in law

Ruby Dandridge is best known and remembered as the mother of Dorothy Dandridge, but like her daughter, she made an indelible mark in the world of entertainment — both on stage and in film. She was born Ruby Jean Butler in Wichita, Kansas, on March 3, 1900. One of four children, her parents were Nellie Simon and George Butler, who worked in the entertainment industry as a “minstrel man.” In September 1919, she married Cyril Dandridge

In her autobiography, Dorothy wrote that her father was known as an entertainer and later owned a grocery store and was the principal of a school. Her mother, Dorothy added, attended school where she learned dancing, singing, horseback riding and acrobatics. Dorothy said her parents broke up while her mother was still pregnant with her. “She left him, and I have never learned clearly what the breakup was about,” she wrote. “But Ruby Dandridge said she had mother-in-law trouble and that Cyril was no provider.”

By 1921, the Dandridge couple lived in Cle

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Dorothy Dandridge

American actress and singer (1922–1965)

Dorothy jean Dandridge (November 9, 1922 – September 8, 1965) was an American actress and singer. She was the first African-American bio star to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Carmen Jones (1954).^[1] Dandridge had also performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. During her early career, she performed as a part of the Wonder Children, later the Dandridge Sisters, and appeared in a succession of films, usually in uncredited roles.

In 1959, Dandridge was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Porgy and Bess. She was the subject of the 1999 biographical bio Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, with Halle Berry portraying her. She had been recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.^[2]

Dandridge was married and divorced twice, first to dancer Harold Nicholas (the father of her daughter, Harolyn Suzanne) and then to hotel owner J

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Dorothy Dandridge accomplished many things in her short life; she was the first Black woman nominated for the best-actress Oscar and the first Black woman on the cover of Life magazine. But she was also plagued by ghosts. In her perceptive, often humorous autobiography, Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy, published in 1970—five years after her death—Dandridge and cowriter Earl Conrad lay out her search for love in candid, often luscious prose. “If it is possible for a human being to be like a haunted house,” she writes, “maybe that would be me.”

The primary ghost in Dandridge’s life was her only child, Harolyn Suzanne “Lynn” Nicholas, born in 1943 during her first marriage to dancing legend Harold Nicholas. Lynn was severely intellectually disabled, a condition Dandridge blamed on her delayed birth (Nicholas had gone golfing and left her without a car). “She’d hug me tight, crushing into my breasts,” Dandridge writes. “I have known quite a few men, since th