Lena Horne, whose stunning beauty and unique blend of aristocratic bearing and down-home manner took her from the Cotton Club chorus line to stardom in Hollywood and on Broadway, died yesterday. She was 92. Ms. Horne died at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. No cause of death was announced.
Ms. Horne’s singing and acting abilities were as notable as her looks. The winner of two Grammy Awards, she recorded the best-selling album by a woman in the history of the RCA label, “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria.” “She’s the best female singer of songs I’ve ever heard,” the songwriter Buddy DeSylva once said. “She gives lyrics a new meaning. She puts something into a lyric that even the author didn’t know was there.”
Her performance in “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music” won Ms. Horne a special Tony Award in 1981, and she appeared in such celebrated films as “Cabin in the Sky” and “Stormy Weather” (both 1943). The title song of the latter became Ms. Horne’s signature number. She was a Kennedy Center honoree in 1984.
Yet much of Ms. Horne’s lengthy career — she started performing professionally at 16 and released her last recording, “Being Myself,” at 81 — was dogged by racial prejudice. “I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”
Lena Calhoun Horne was born on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. The daughter of Edwin F. Horne, a civil servant and numbers runner, and Edna (Scottron) Horne, an actress, she came from a politically prominent family. Ms. Horne’s paternal grandmother belonged to the National Urban League and the NAACP (and enrolled her 2-year-old granddaughter in the latter organization). Her maternal grandfather was the first African-American member of the Brooklyn Board of Education. And an uncle unofficially served Franklin D. Roosevelt as an adviser on racial matters.
Lena Calhoun Horne was born on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. The daughter of Edwin F. Horne, a civil servant and numbers runner, and Edna (Scottron) Horne, an actress, she came from a politically prominent family. Ms. Horne’s paternal grandmother belonged to the National Urban League and the NAACP (and enrolled her 2-year-old granddaughter in the latter organization). Her maternal grandfather was the first African-American member of the Brooklyn Board of Education. And an uncle unofficially served Franklin D. Roosevelt as an adviser on racial matters.
Ms. Horne’s husband died in 1971, as did her son, Edwin. She leaves a daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, of New York, and six grandchildren.
Lena Horne
