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Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on May 10, 2010

Multi-talented, inspirational Lena Horne has passed away... rest in peace, beautiful lady

No one was ever like Lena Horne. I doubt there ever will be anyone quite like this ageless, beautiful, talented, inspirational woman. What a face… what a voice. What a spirit.

Rest in peace, Lena… thank you for your wonderful gifts to entertain and your tenacity and courage. You inspired millions.

From NJ.com, Lena Horne: Jersey jazz artists remember the showbiz legend:

Lena Horne impressed audiences with her wit, her sophistication, her talent — and her courage, too.

“Aside from her impeccable musical legacy, we honor her for coming of age in an era that didn’t accept her”, says jazz guitarist and Saddle River native John Pizzarelli, who testifies to Horne’s enduring influence on generations of musicians.

“No matter how she was received — in Hollywood and elsewhere — she continued to be marvelous, and she continued to do terrific shows,” he says.

Pizzarelli remembers Lena Horne as a trendsetter and groundbreaker: one who went smashing through social barriers, and who, in the process, enlightened her listeners as much as she entertained them.

Ed Berger agrees with the guitarist’s assessment.

“She was just as important as a social force and a catalyst as she was in music,” says Berger, the associate director of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark. “She used her unique position in music to advance her social aims and goals.”

Those who worked with Horne remember her strength of character — and the high standards she set for herself.

“She did things her way, and she knew what she wanted,” said Mike Renzi, the musical director of “An Evening With Lena Horne,” her 1994 album. The pianist, a one-time Fort Lee resident, recalls introducing a difficult, “talky” song to her. While Horne lacked the technical knowledge to call for a diminished chord, Renzi read her reaction to the unsatisfactory arrangement loud and clear.

“She told me, “Give me something that sounds a bit more confusing.”

It was exactly what the song needed.

Associated Press: Lena Horne — Activist and Singer — Dies at 92

From Adam Bernstein, Lena Horne dies at 92; performer altered Hollywood’s image of black women:

Lena Horne, 92, an electrifying performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented black women and who enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in films, died of a heart ailment May 9 at a hospital in New York.

Ms. Horne, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.

“What people tend not to fully comprehend today is what Lena Horne did to transform the image of the African American woman in Hollywood,” said Donald Bogle, a film historian.

“Movies are a powerful medium and always depicted African American women before Lena Horne as hefty, mammy-like maids who were ditzy and giggling,” Bogle said. “Lena Horne becomes the first one the studios begin to look at differently. . . . Really just by being there, being composed and onscreen with her dignity intact, paved the way for a new day” for black actresses.

He said Ms. Horne’s influence was apparent within a few years of her leaving Hollywood, starting with actress Dorothy Dandridge’s movie work in the 1950s. Later, Halle Berry, who won the 2001 Best Actress Oscar for “Monster’s Ball,” called Ms. Horne an inspiration.

Ms. Horne’s reputation in Hollywood rested on a handful of musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: “Cabin in the Sky,” as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie “Rochester” Anderson; and “Stormy Weather,” in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South.

“Mississippi wanted its movies without me,” she told the New York Times in 1957. “So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut.” In Hollywood, she received previously unheard-of star treatment for a black actor. Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Horne in movies and advertisements as glamorously as were white beauties including Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.

Nevertheless, Ms. Horne was frustrated by infrequent movie work and feeling limited in her development as an actress. She confronted studio officials about roles she thought demeaning, a decision that eventually hurt her.

James Gavin, a historian of cabaret acts who has written a biography of Ms. Horne, said: “Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar.”

Lena Horne – Stormy Weather (1943)

Lena Horne Performs Moon River – 1965

Lena Horne – Flip Wilson Show, “I’ve Got to Have You” (1973)

From Washington Post, Remembering Lena Horne: 1917 – 2010

Born on June 30, 1917, Lena Horne was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. She came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942 and was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.

Horne died at the age of 92 on May 9 at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.

Lena Horne – To Basie With Love TV, “If You Believe” from The Wiz (1982)

Lena Horne – Gap Commercial (1997)

From The Boston Globe, Lena Horne, 92, legendary beauty and racial pioneer:

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.”

At a time in Hollywood history when even so proud a performer as Billie Holiday was reduced to playing a maid (in the 1947 film “New Orleans”), Ms. Horne refused to be cast as a domestic or in other stereotypical roles. She was most often filmed standing against a pillar as she sang in musical numbers that weren’t integrated into the movie’s plot, thus making them easily excisable for showings in Southern theaters. The fact that Ms. Horne’s second husband, the arranger Lennie Hayton, was white further violated racial mores.

“I’m in Hollywood but not of Hollywood, because I’m Negro,” Ms. Horne noted in a 1947 interview. “I’d like to do a good, serious role in a mixed-cast movie instead of being confined to café singer parts.”

That confinement extended to Broadway, where she was passed over for the part of Julie in a 1946 Broadway revival of “Show Boat” — this despite Ms. Horne being the choice of the musical’s composer, Jerome Kern. She would also be passed over for the role in the 1951 film version in favor of the nonsinging Ava Gardner.

Ms. Horne liked to joke that she couldn’t complain because she and Gardner were good friends. In a further irony, Gardner’s skin was darkened with the brand of makeup, Light Egyptian, that MGM had commissioned Max Factor to develop for Ms. Horne several years earlier because her café-au-lait complexion photographed too “light.”

From Michael Moriarty, Big Hollywood: Lena Horne: One More Divinity Just Passed Away:

I attended Lena Horne’s appearance on Broadway with my son Matthew who was perhaps five or six at the time. I was not going to lose this opportunity, this gift to my son of a priceless memory.

I myself had been given one by my own father when he took me at about the same age to hear the great Art Tatum.

The owners of the bar would not let me in. I was obviously too young.

My father and I stood just outside the front door, in the rain, and tried, as best we could, to hear the limitlessly rich and miraculous variations on any and every theme by Art Tatum.

In the same spirit I took my son Matthew to experience the Divine Lena Horne.

“Matthew,” she said as we spoke to her after the show, “I saw you in the third row! You were asleep!!”

Matthew’s face pouted slightly as he huddled next to me.

“I would,” she added with one of her grandest smiles, “have done the same thing at your age!”

Such brushes with divinity are beyond unforgettable.

They are the more than Ordinary Miracles of life.

From BlueyedDaizy, We’ve lost an absolute treasure…

…My observations are primarily from the viewpoint of her amazing talent. They do not touch on the amazing influence she had on race relations in Hollywood and beyond. One incident in particular stands out: during a performance for the USO at Ft. Riley, KS, Lena walked off stage to the back of the room when she noticed that German prisoners of war were seated in front of black American soldiers! In a Tribune interview years later, she said of the incident, “I just walked off stage and went up and sang to the back of the room. It happened a couple of times, and they finally said, ‘Get her out of the USO’. I just reacted as Lena.”

Peace to you Ms. Horne, and thank you for sharing your gifts with the world.

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