Hattie McDaniel

Hattie McDaniel was a talented and pioneering African American actress of the 1930s and 1940s – but her career was not without controversy. Known for playing maids and servants across film, TV and radio, she is most famous for her role as Mammy in the 1939 civil war epic Gone With the Wind (PG). This role, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, made her the first black actor to win an Academy Award and one of the most successful black actors of her time.

Born in 1892, in Kansas, Hattie was the child of two former slaves. Her path to Hollywood began when she joined her brother’s minstrel show. Made up of dancing, comedy and music acts the show travelled America until the Great Depression of the 1930s meant they could not afford to continue. Taking work as a bathroom attendant in a nightclub in Milwaukee, Hattie was soon on the stage again when the owner of the club discovered her voice. She performed at the club for a year then moved to Los Angeles in 1931 where her brother Sam got her a part in the radio play The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour. Playing Hi-Hat Hattie, a bossy maid, she was the first black woman to sing on radio.

Following her radio success she won small roles as maids or servants in films - her first being in The Golden West (1932) and continuing with films such as Blonde Venus (1932) alongside Marlene Dietrich and I’m No Angel (1933). Hattie was not credited in these films. It was only when she sang with Hollywood hero Will Rogers in 1934’s Judge Priest that she began to be noticed.

From then on Hattie was invited to play meatier roles, still maids or servants but with more lines and a bit more attitude. She built a career around being the comically outspoken and spiky domestic help, like Queenie in Show Boat (1936), leading her to the award-winning role of the daringly honest but caring Mammy alongside Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind (1939).

Unfortunately while Hattie celebrated her rise to fame, some civil rights leaders were embarrassed by what they saw as her promotion of a negative and dismissive stereotype of black people as doting, domestic servants. Her response to them was strong, announcing "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one".

Hattie continued her success into the 1940s, ending her career as the Housekeeper Beulah Brown in the TV family comedy The Beulah Show. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she quit the show early in 1952 and died later that year.

A controversial figure to the end, her dying wish be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery alongside other movies stars including Rudolph Valentino was refused by the cemetery’s racist owners - instead she was laid to rest in Rosedale Cemetery. In 1999 the cemetery came under new ownership, and they offered to right this wrong by reinterring her body. Her family didn’t want her remains disturbed, but a large memorial now stands there in her honour and is a popular place of pilgrimage for the fans she continues to inspire.