Harry Belafonte (New York, 1927) has died this Tuesday at the age of 96. The musician, actor and activist for the rights of black people marked an era in the 50s when he broke barriers in a world in which Jamaicans and people of color were discriminated against. Married three times and father of four children, including actress and model Shari Belafonte, his success made him a leader in the fight for human rights in the US.
Ken Sunshine, his spokesman and agent, has been in charge of transmitting the fatal news. Sunshine himself has explained that the cause of death was heart failure. Born in the popular Harlem neighborhood of New York to immigrant parents, Belafontera was known as the ‘King of Calypso’. His musical career spanned six decades, beginning, after a brief stint in the Navy, in different New York gambling dens both as an actor and a singer.
During his lifetime he achieved success thanks to songs like ‘Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)’ and ‘Jamaica Farewell’. Precisely. their album ‘Calypso’—which included both songs—reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks.
In the 1960s he began working with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movements. In addition, he was behind the hit song ‘We Are the World’, full of celebrities who sang against hunger and in favor of children in the 80s. To the rhythm of Caribbean sounds, the New Yorker earned the nickname of ‘the king of calypso’ and reached the top of the charts.
One million copies sold
Just before Elvis Presley’s breakthrough, it achieved the milestone of being the first album by a single artist to sell over a million copies. ‘Matilda’, ‘Lead Man Holler’, or ‘Scarlet Ribbons’ are some of the other songs that raised him to stardom. In addition, he allowed him to make the leap to the cinema, becoming the first black actor to achieve great success in Hollywood as a leading man. In 1957 he starred in the film ‘An Island in the Sun’, in which he played a black politician on a fictitious island, he was the lover of Joan Fontaine, a very white woman, which led to fire threats in theaters in the southern United States.
Belafonte was the first black actor to win a major Emmy Award, in 1960, with his role in a television variety special. In 2014, he received the Humanitarian Award from the Hollywood Film Academy. A year earlier, he also jumped into the press for a complaint filed against the legal heirs and the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. in a dispute over the ownership of some documents.
2023-04-25 14:32:42
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