He bought a club in Greenwich Village and gravitated to folk music as the best way to combine his acting and singing talents.

He landed a job singing standards like “Pennies From Heaven” for $70 a week at the Royal Roost, a New York nightclub, and his original two-week contract was extended to 22. He also began a lifelong friendship with another struggling actor, Sidney Poitier, whose parents were from the Bahamas.Īt the New School, Belafonte’s performance of an original song, “Recognition,” won him applause and prompted him to consider a music career. Later, he participated in the Alabama march from Selma to Montgomery (archive footage of him appears in the 2014 film Selma), performed in Paris and Stockholm for the first European-sponsored benefit concerts on behalf of King and sat alongside his widow at MLK’s funeral.īelafonte later enrolled in The Actors Studio and Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, where his fellow students included Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando. Both movies were financed by his own company, HarBel Productions.įollowing an acclaimed Carnegie Hall two-night stand in April 1959, Belafonte won an Emmy for his Revlon Revue TV special, Tonight With Belafonte.īelafonte - who found inspiration in such figures as Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson - helped round up celebrities for the Freedom March on Washington in 1963, when King delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech. Zanuck-produced Island in the Sun (1957), his politician character is romantically pursued by a rich white woman ( Joan Fontaine), a storyline that created much controversy (and big box office) at the time.Īnd in two films released in 1959, he played a bank robber opposite a racist partner (Robert Ryan) in Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow and survived a nuclear disaster - and then battled Mel Ferrer over Swedish actress Inger Stevens - in The World, the Flesh and the Devil. On the big screen in the late 1950s, Belafonte was a matinee idol and rarely seen non-white sex symbol.

It was one of three albums he had that year that made it into the top 3. Striking Writers Mock 'Wednesday' Star Jenna OrtegaĪ master at blending pop, jazz and traditional West Indian rhythms, the Caribbean-American Belafonte released more than 30 albums during his career and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy from the Recording Academy in 2000.Ĭalypso, which featured “Day-O” and another hit, “Jamaica Farewell,” topped the Billboard pop album list for an incredible 31 weeks in 1956 and is credited as the first LP to sell 1 million copies.

I Heart Hollywood by Lindsey Kelk