Born: 10 June 1895, United States
Died: 26 October 1952
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Oscar, knew she wanted to be an actress when she was six years old. “I knew that I could sing and dance,” she later said. “My mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop.” Born in 1895 to a formerly enslaved woman and a Civil War veteran, McDaniel started her career in her teens as part of a minstrel troop and taking jobs as a maid and laundress to make ends meet. In 1914, she and her sister launched an all-female minstrel show, the McDaniel Sisters Company, in which she developed a trademark “Mammy” character who used comedy to defy and critique the period’s racial and gender stereotypes. Ironically, it was those same stereotypes that she would be criticized for upholding in her most famous role as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, the performance for which she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. In the 1930s, when jobs for performers were scarce due to the Great Depression, McDaniel played maids or cooks in almost 40 films. In some instances, she was able to subvert the submissive maid trope, as in 1935’s Alice Adams, where her comedic grumbling maid was a highlight of the film, which was released when McDaniel was 40.
McDaniel would appear in more than 300 films. In 1947, she became the first African American to star in a weekly radio program for general audiences when she agreed to play a maid on The Beulah Show, which she would do until shortly before her death in 1952. Yet even in her success, she faced segregation—she was prevented from attending the Gone With the Wind premiere at a whites-only Atlanta theater and was forced to sit at a segregated table at the Oscars ceremony where she made history, because it was held at a whites-only establishment. The film’s producers had to get special permission for her to even attend. Even in death, her body was refused for burial in a segregated cemetery. Yet for all that many African Americans criticized her for portraying stereotypical roles—as if there were so many options for middle-aged African American actresses in those days—McDaniel used the proceeds to donate generously to causes like the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and provide scholarships. While the criticism may have bothered McDaniel, she was able to speak from experience when she replied that she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one in real life.