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Lena Horne

Lena Horne is a popular jazz singer, best known for her 1943 version of "Stormy Weather". She has an elegant style and a powerful, expressive voice.

Lena Horne was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents divorced when she was three, and with her mother touring as an actress she was brought up by her grandparents. She left school at 14 and got her first job singing and dancing at the Cotton Club in Harlem at age 16, where she was helped by artists such Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. By the late 1930s Lena Horne was a star nightclub singer, appearing in Broadway musicals and touring first with the all black "Noble Sissle Society Orchestra", then with Charlie Barnet's mainly white swing band. Some of her first recordings were made with the Charlie Barnet band.

As an actress, she appeared in the 1938 "race" movie "The Duke Is Tops". She signed a 7 year contract with MGM in 1942, first appearing in the musical "Panama Hattie" that year. Lena Horne became famous for her performance of "Stormy Weather" in the highly successful 1943 musical movie of the same name. Although she played in several MGM musicals, she was never given a leading role because of her black heritage. In 1946 she married her (white) MGM mentor and conductor Lennie Haydon in a secret ceremony in Paris to avoid publicity about the "inter-racial" marriage.

During the 1950s Lena Horne sang in nightclubs and in Broadway musicals. Her 1957 album "Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria" was recorded at the height of her powers. In 1958 she was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in the musical "Jamaica". She continued to tour internationally and perform with great success throughout the 1960s. With the death of her husband in 1970 and son in 1971, she cut back on public appearances, but still performed in a number of TV shows and concerts. Her last big movie role was as Glinda The Good Witch in The Wiz (1978).

Lena Horne was active in the civil rights movement from the start of her career. During world war II she refused to perform for segregated audiences. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching legislation. In the early 1950s, her civil rights activity caused her to be blacklisted from TV and the movies, branded as a subversive and communist sympathizer. She was not cleared from the blacklist until 1957. She attended the March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, and frequently spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP.

In 1981 Lena Horne re-launched her career with the triumphant one-person Broadway show "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music", which ran for fourteen months. Lena Horne made infrequent performances into the 1990s, releasing the album "Being There" in 1998 at the age of 81.

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