1. Harry Belafonte recorded and performed in many genres, including blues, folk, gospel, show tunes, and American standards.
87 Facts About Harry Belafonte
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Harry Belafonte starred in films such as Carmen Jones, Island in the Sun, Odds Against Tomorrow, Buck and the Preacher, and Uptown Saturday Night.
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Harry Belafonte considered the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson to be a mentor.
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Harry Belafonte was a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr.
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Harry Belafonte was a vocal critic of the policies of the George W Bush and Donald Trump administrations.
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Harry Belafonte won three Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, an Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award.
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Harry Belafonte was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994.
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Harry Belafonte is one of the few performers to have received an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, although he won the Oscar in a non-competitive category.
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Harry Belafonte's mother was the child of a Scottish Jamaican mother and an Afro-Jamaican father, and his father was the child of an Afro-Jamaican mother and a Dutch-Jewish father of Sephardic Jewish descent.
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From 1932 to 1940, Harry Belafonte lived with one of his grandmothers in her native country of Jamaica, where he attended Wolmer's Schools.
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Harry Belafonte fell in love with the art form and befriended Sidney Poitier, who was financially struggling.
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Harry Belafonte subsequently received a Tony Award for his participation in the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac.
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Harry Belafonte starred in the 1955 Broadway revue 3 for Tonight with Gower Champion.
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Harry Belafonte started his career in music as a club singer in New York to pay for his acting classes.
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Harry Belafonte launched his recording career as a pop singer on the Roost label in 1949, but quickly developed a keen interest in folk music, learning material through the Library of Congress' American folk songs archives.
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Harry Belafonte performed during the Rat Pack era in Las Vegas.
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Harry Belafonte stated that it was the first million-selling album ever in England.
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The album introduced American audiences to calypso music, which had originated in Trinidad and Tobago in the early 19th century, and Harry Belafonte was dubbed the "King of Calypso", a title he wore with reservations since he had no claims to any Calypso Monarch titles.
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Harry Belafonte was the first Jamaican American to win an Emmy, for Revlon Revue: Tonight with Harry Belafonte.
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Harry Belafonte was one of many entertainers recruited by Frank Sinatra to perform at the inaugural gala of President John F Kennedy in 1961, which included Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson, among others.
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Harry Belafonte's last hit single, "A Strange Song", was released in 1967 and peaked at number 5 on the adult contemporary music charts.
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In 1967, Harry Belafonte was the first non-classical artist to perform at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Upstate New York, soon to be followed by concerts there by the Doors, the 5th Dimension, the Who, and Janis Joplin.
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From February 5 to 9,1968, Harry Belafonte guest hosted The Tonight Show substituting for Johnny Carson.
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Harry Belafonte's recording activity slowed down after releasing his final album for RCA in 1974.
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From 1979 to 1989, Harry Belafonte served on the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's board of directors.
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Harry Belafonte released his first album of original material in over a decade, Paradise in Gazankulu, in 1988, which contained ten protest songs against the South African Apartheid policy, and was his last studio album.
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Harry Belafonte went on the Today Show to promote the album on September 11,2001, and was interviewed by Katie Couric just minutes before the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
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Harry Belafonte was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and he won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
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Harry Belafonte performed sold-out concerts globally through the 1950s to the 2000s.
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Harry Belafonte's last concert was a benefit concert for the Atlanta Opera on October 25,2003.
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On January 29,2013, Harry Belafonte was the keynote speaker and 2013 honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design.
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Harry Belafonte used his career and experiences with King to speak on the role of artists as activists.
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Harry Belafonte was inducted as an honorary member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity on January 11,2014.
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In March 2014, Harry Belafonte was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in Boston.
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Ironically, Harry Belafonte's singing in the film was dubbed by an opera singer, as was Dandridge's, both voices being deemed unsuitable for their roles.
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In 1959, Harry Belafonte starred in and produced Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, in which Harry Belafonte plays a bank robber uncomfortably teamed with a racist partner.
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Harry Belafonte co-starred with Inger Stevens in The World, the Flesh and the Devil.
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Dissatisfied with most of the film roles offered to him during the 1960s, Harry Belafonte concentrated on music.
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In 1984, Harry Belafonte produced and scored the musical film Beat Street, dealing with the rise of hip-hop culture.
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Harry Belafonte next starred in a major film in the mid-1990s, appearing with John Travolta in the race-reverse drama White Man's Burden ; and in Robert Altman's jazz age drama Kansas City, the latter of which garnered him the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor.
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Harry Belafonte starred as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in the TV drama Swing Vote.
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In 2006, Belafonte appeared in Bobby, Emilio Estevez's ensemble drama about the assassination of Robert F Kennedy; he played Nelson, a friend of an employee of the Ambassador Hotel.
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Harry Belafonte is said to have married politics and pop culture.
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Harry Belafonte refused to perform in the American South from 1954 until 1961.
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Harry Belafonte gave the keynote address at the ACLU of Northern California's annual Bill of Rights Day Celebration In December 2007 and was awarded the Chief Justice Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award.
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Harry Belafonte supported the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and was one of Martin Luther King Jr.
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Harry Belafonte provided for King's family since King earned only $8,000 a year as a preacher.
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In 1968, Harry Belafonte appeared on a Petula Clark primetime television special on NBC.
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Harry Belafonte taped an appearance on an episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to be aired on September 29,1968, performing a controversial Mardi Gras number intercut with footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots.
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Fresh off of his win as the first Black man to receive an Emmy Award for his work on Tonight with Harry Belafonte, Harry Belafonte was Kennedy's pick to fill the endorsement position.
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Harry Belafonte thought to accomplish this by having Belafonte mobilize his influence amongst other Black entertainers of the era, persuading them to rally for Kennedy's presidential nomination.
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Unexpectedly, Harry Belafonte was not so impressed by the candidate, sharing the same sentiments as Robinson about Kennedy's role in maintaining civil rights as an essential part of his campaign.
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Harry Belafonte met with fifteen others, including Kennedy and Baldwin, in Kennedy's Central Park South apartment on May 24,1963.
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Harry Belafonte then told him that even with the meeting's tension, he needed to be in the presence of a man like Smith to understand Black people's frustration with patriotism that Kennedy and other leaders could not understand.
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In 2011, Harry Belafonte commented on the Obama administration and the role that popular opinion played in shaping its policies.
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In November 2014, Harry Belafonte attended "Revolution and Religion," a dialogue between Bob Avakian and Cornel West at Riverside Church in New York City.
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Harry Belafonte was an honorary cochairman of the Women's March on Washington, which took place on January 21,2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
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In 1985, Harry Belafonte helped organize the Grammy Award-winning song "We Are the World", a multi-artist effort to raise funds for Africa.
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Harry Belafonte performed in the Live Aid concert that same year.
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In 2004, Harry Belafonte traveled to Kenya to stress the importance of educating children in the region.
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Harry Belafonte had been involved in prostate cancer advocacy since 1996, when he was diagnosed and successfully treated for the disease.
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On June 27,2006, Harry Belafonte received the BET Humanitarian Award at the 2006 BET Awards.
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Harry Belafonte was named one of nine 2006 Impact Award recipients by AARP: The Magazine.
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On October 19,2007, Harry Belafonte represented UNICEF on Norwegian television to support the annual telethon and helped raise a world record of $10 per Norwegian citizen.
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Harry Belafonte sat on the board of directors of the Advancement Project.
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Harry Belafonte served on the advisory council of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
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In 2013, Harry Belafonte was named a grand marshal of the New York City Pride Parade alongside Edie Windsor and Earl Fowlkes.
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Harry Belafonte began making controversial political statements on the subject in the early 1980s.
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Harry Belafonte is known for his visit to Cuba that helped ensure hip-hop's place in Cuban society.
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Harry Belafonte was a board member of the TransAfrica Forum and the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Harry Belafonte used the quotation to characterize former United States Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
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Harry Belafonte liked and often visited the Caribbean island of Bonaire.
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Harry Belafonte had an affair with actress Joan Collins during the filming of Island in the Sun.
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On March 8,1957, Harry Belafonte married his second wife Julie Robinson, a dancer with the Katherine Dunham Company who was of Jewish descent.
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In Fall 1958, Harry Belafonte was looking for an apartment to rent on the Upper West Side.
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Harry Belafonte lived in the 21-room, 6-bedroom apartment for 48 years.
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Harry Belafonte had five grandchildren: Rachel and Brian through his children with Marguerite Byrd, and Maria, Sarafina and Amadeus through his children with Robinson.
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Harry Belafonte had two great-grandchildren by his oldest grandson Brian.
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In October 1998, Harry Belafonte contributed a letter to Liv Ullmann's book Letter to My Grandchild.
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In 1996, Harry Belafonte was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was treated for the disease.
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Harry Belafonte suffered a stroke in 2004, which took away his inner-ear balance.
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From 2019, Harry Belafonte's health began to decline, but he remained an active and prominent figure in the civil rights movement.
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Harry Belafonte died from congestive heart failure at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, on April 25,2023, at the age of 96.
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Harry Belafonte released 27 studio albums, 8 live albums, and 6 collaborations, and achieved critical and commercial success.
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Harry Belafonte is an EGOT honoree, having received three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a Tony Award, and, in 2014, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 6th Annual Governors Awards.
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Harry Belafonte won an Emmy in 1960 for his performance on Revlon Revue.
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Harry Belafonte received various honours including the Kennedy Center Honors in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category in 2022.