Lena Horne Biography, Photos and Posters

Lena Horne

Biography

Born: June 30, 1917
City and Country of Origin: Brooklyn, New York
Music Training:
Awards:Grammy, 1961 Female Solo Vocal Performance, Lena at the Sands; 1962 Best Female Vocal Performance Porgy and Bess; 1981 Best Cast Show Album Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music; 1981 Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music; 1988 Best Jazz Vocal Performance – Duo or Group "I Won't Leave You Again"; 1988 Best Jazz Vocal Performance – Female The Men in My Life; 1989 Lifetime Achievement Awards; 1995 Best Jazz Vocal Performance, An Evening with Lena Horne Jazz Blue Note Winner 1989 Lifetime Achievement Awards
Top Recordings: "Stormy Weather," "Love Me or Leave Me," "I Won't Leave You Again"
Lena Horne Biography: Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was an American singer, actress and dancer. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her progressive political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Horne was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. She was reportedly descended from the family of, seventh vice president of the United States, John C. Calhoun , both sides of her family were a mixture of African, European, and Native American descent. Each side belonged to what W. E. B. Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth," the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated African Americans.[2] She grew up in an upper-middle-class black community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[3] Her father, Edwin "Teddy" Horne (died 1970),[4] a numbers kingpin in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three. Her mother, Edna Scottron, daughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron, was an actress with an African-American theater troupe and traveled extensively.

Horne was mainly raised by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne. Her uncle, Frank S. Horne, was an adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute in Fort Valley GA. She attended Washington High School in Atlanta, where her grandmother convinced her to join the NAACP.[5] Horne also attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn, which has since become Boys & Girls High School, on Fulton Street; she dropped out without earning a diploma.

In 1933, she joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York's Harlem district. By 1934 she became a featured performer in the Cotton Club Parade. After touring with bandleader Charlie Barnett she went to work at the Café Society in New York City. She replaced Dinah Shore NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. She started her recording career with RCA Victor in 1941.

By 1938, Horne had already appeared in two low budgect films. During this time HOrne left New York to work on the West Coast, primarily as a nightclub performer. She signed a movie contract with MGM in 1943, making her the first African American to sign a long term contract with a Hollywood studio. She made her debut with MGM in 1942's Panama Hattie, and performed the title song of Stormy Weather (1943), which she made at 20th Century Fox, on loan from MGM. She appeared in a number of MGM musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky (also 1943), but was never featured in a leading role because of her ethnicity and the fact that films featuring her had to be re-edited for showing in states where theaters could not show films with African American performers.

Horne married Louis Jordan Jones in January 1937 and lived in Pittsburgh. In December 1937 they had a daughter, Gail, and a son, Edwin (February 1940 - 1970), who died of kidney disease. Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944.

Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, a Jewish American and one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM, in December 1947. They separated in the early 1960s, but never divorced; he died in 1971. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial married couple. She later admitted in a 1980 Ebony interview she had married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business.

Horne was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.

Screenwriter Jenny Lumet, known for her award-winning screenplay Rachel Getting Married, is Horne's granddaughter, the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet and Horne's daughter Gail.

Horne died on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92, at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
Died: May 9, 2010

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