Ellen Holly Credit: Courtesy of publicist Cheryl Duncan
by
As many of you know, this column each week is dedicated to rescuing rather obscure but remarkable Black Americans from obscurity. There have, however, been several occasions when a celebrity dies and we can depart from our normal process to let an obituary do double duty for the paper. The death of actress Ellen Holly on December 6 in the Bronx at Calvary Hospital, at 92, provides such a moment for reflection and condolence.
First and foremost, Holly was a phenomenal actress whose role on the ABC soap opera, “One Life to Live,” was a breakthrough for an African American in a leading role on daytime television. She was born on January 16, 1931, in New York City, and “at the age of seventeen,” she noted in her memoir, One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress, “I moved into a world of professionals: actors, singers, dancers, playwrights, and poets. Each nursed some vision that could not be realized in the white world but could be nurtured in the hothouse of exploding Black creative energy…” It was during this period that she met Harry Belafonte.
When the book was published in 1996, readers couldn’t wait to see what she had to say about her relationship with Belafonte, which, for the most part, was an off-and-on romance that ended up a bitter disappointment for her. At the end of the book, she wrote: “I will never defend the trivializing of black women. It was wrong for Harry to treat Eartha Kitt and me like hookers. But that is a different issue. Where the central issue is concerned, I am quite clear about the fact that one of the freedoms I must help the black man to secure, if that freedom is to have real meaning, is the freedom of a Harry Belafonte to choose not Black Ellen but White Julie as his Holy Grail if that is the quest his head and his heart compel him so absolutely to undertake.”
None of this was discussed in Belafonte’s memoir My Song, nor was her name mentioned.
But back to the arc of Holly’s life and her student days at Hunter College, where she starred in such productions as Electra in “Daughters of Atreus”; Tituba in “The Crucible”; and the adolescent Olivia in Moss Hart’s play, “Climate of Eden.”
In 1956, Holly debuted on Broadway in a play by South African writer Alan Paton. The audience was not aware that she had darkened her light skin with a dye concocted by her chemist father. Despite the rave notices, she wrote in her autobiography, in audition after audition, she was told she was too fair-skinned and too elegant to play a real Black woman.
Holly got her most significant role as Carla Gray in 1968 in “One Life…” She was 37 and the part would be hers for 12 years and another two more years from 1983–85. She got this role as a result of a letter to the editor of the New York Times about the challenges a light-complexioned actress faced. Agnes Nixon, creator of the soap, created the role for Holly.
Some of Holly’s mixed ancestry appears in Pound for Pound, a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson. Edna Mae Holly, Sugar Ray’s wife, was Ellen Holly’s younger cousin—and that’s just the middle of a very complicated family tree that, at some points, includes Sidney Poitier and Bishop James T. Holly, the first Black Episcopal bishop in America. According to Wikipedia, Holly’s great-great-grandfather was Sylvanus Smith, one of many leaders encouraging African American people to purchase land in Kings County, N.Y. (later known as the Weeksville Settlement). Her maternal aunt was Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a civil rights leader, politician, educator, and writer who served under President Harry Truman as executive director of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission.
The issue of her color was of no consequence in Holly’s role in Spike Lee’s “School Daze” (1988), in which skin color is ironically a theme but has nothing to do with her character.
Holly never married or had children, and other than her love affair with Belafonte, only the actor Roger Hill, her co-star on “One Life to Live,” is listed among her paramours. She was a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. In the 1990s, according to her publicist, she took the civil service examination and became a librarian, serving as such for many years at the White Plains (N.Y.) Public Library. In her autobiography, she referred to her years there as some of the happiest of her life.
This article originally appeared in the Amsterdam News.
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