What Diahann Carroll Left Behind
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The Tony winner and Academy Award nominee was 84 when she passed, but left behind a legacy that is the foundation for Black actors today.
As the star of Julia, which ran on NBC between 1968 and 1971, Carroll played a character that pioneered black women in television. Julia was a single Black mother raising her son following the death of her husband in the Vietnam War. Here was Carroll playing a character unlike anything on television before: A Black woman who wasn’t a maid. And she was the star. It was unprecedented stuff, and she knew it too.
In 1968, Carroll told TV Guide that Julia was something the Black community needed. “For a hundred years we have been prevented from seeing accurate images of ourselves and we’re all over concerned-and overreacting,” she said.
The show was a hit despite the wariness of the network and critics who didn’t see Julia’s character as realistic. On the contrary, a woman trying to balance career and motherhood alone was very relatable. In its first year, Carroll received an Emmy nomination for actress in a lead role, making her the first Black woman to earn a nomination in that category.
She would later receive more Emmy nominations for her work in Grey’s Anatomy as Dr. Burke’s mother, and A Different World. Playing Whitley’s mother, anyone could probably recall Carroll telling Dwayne Wayne to ‘just die!’ But among her iconic characters, her role as Dominique Deveraux on the soap opera, Dynasty.
The 80s were an era for breakthroughs in soap operas, and Carroll was again made her mark as the first major African American actor playing a role on a primetime soap. Dominique Deveraux was confident, fierce, but played the villain with regality. Most notably, she told an interviewer on the set of Dynasty, “I wanted to be the first black bitch on television.” She played that, and so much more.
Before she came onto the small screen in the homes of families, Carroll had already established herself with notable acting chops when she won a Tony in 1962 in the Richard Rogers musical, No Strings. In her acceptance speech, excited and ebullient, she thanked Rogers for putting her on stage.
In 1974, Carroll was nominated for an Oscar for best actress, for Claudine, a movie about a poor single mother in Harlem who finds love with a garbage collector. Carroll recalled the experience telling the National Visionary Leadership that she almost asked to not be paid because she enjoyed the filming process so much.
From Debbie Allen to Ava DuVernay the outpouring of condolences ran deep. Black-ish star, Jennifer Lewis posted on Instagram, “Diahann Carroll built herself from the ground up. And when it’s all said and done, we all stole from her.”
A common refrain for Carroll seemed to be people giving thanks to her for leading the way. Ava DuVernay tweeted, “She blazed trails through dense forests and elegantly left diamonds along the path…Thank you, Ms. Carroll.” Co-creator of Mixed-ish and actress, Tracee Ellis Ross posted a video of Carroll from Dynasty, with the caption, “You made history repeatedly, you changed the landscape of our lives…”
As a young girl it seemed like she was destined for the spotlight. Growing up in Harlem, Carroll went the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City and became a model for Ebony Magazine at just 15 — long before venturing into acting, but her upbringing — her father a subway conductor, and her mother a homemaker is arguably what molded her into the actress she was.
In 2002 she said, “I like to think that I opened doors for women, although that wasn’t my original intention.” Her legacy lives on in television, film, and women like Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay breaking barriers in the industry everyday.