Lena Horne Dies

Lena Horne, who died on May 9 aged 92, was a singer, actress, civil rights activist and, eventually, a show business phenomenon, after a career spanning more than 70 years.


Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in a small Jewish hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30 1917. That summer saw 10,000 blacks marching down Fifth Avenue in protest against lynchings in the South .

Her father, Teddy (said to have connections with the gangster Dutch Schultz), walked out on his wife and child in 1920. Lena’s mother, Edna, moved to Harlem, where she joined the Lafayette Stock Company, a theatrical touring group promoting black artists, among them Paul Robeson.

Lena, meanwhile, was sent to live with her grandmother, Cora, a formidable matriarch and feminist known as “The Tiny Terror”. A disciplinarian, she insisted that her charge spoke “properly” and never used slang. Lena was sent to a private kindergarten, at which she was the only “colored” pupil. She often played with the children of Swedish immigrants, but was strictly forbidden to mix with the tenement Irish, who were frowned upon by middle-class blacks.

Later her mother retrieved her child and moved to Miami, where Lena’s schoolfriends made fun of her accent and her skin color, calling her a “little yellow bastard”.

In 1934 Lena was hired as a dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, the most famous speakeasy in New York.

During her long career, she toured internationally, appearing several times at the London Palladium and the London Casino. She also recorded many albums, ranging from jazz and blues to Rodgers and Hart songs such as The Lady is a Tramp. Altogether she appeared in some 15 films, among them I Dood It (1943) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). The last, Death of a Gunfighter, came out in 1969, after which she retired to Los Angeles to grow cacti.

In 1981 she returned to Broadway in a one-woman show, A Lady and her Music, which ran for two and a half years and for which she won a Tony Award.

Lena Horne had a son and a daughter by her first marriage. Her son predeceased her.