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Lena Horne was born on this day in 1917

Word of the Day – Thursday, June 30th

 


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LENA (LEE-nuh)

1. American popular singer

2. Actress Olin

Common clue: Horne; Singer Horne; Entertainer Horne; Musical Horne; Chanteuse Horne; “Stormy Weather” singer Horne; Actress Olin; Olin of “Alias”; Olin of “Chocolat”

See also: Lena Olin

Crossword puzzle frequency: 6 times a year

Frequency in English language: 29936 / 86800

News: The Night Lena Horne Rescued the Joffrey Ballet: A Birthday Tribute

Video: Lena Horne Tribute


My identity is very clear to me now, I am a black woman ~ Lena Horne


Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, actress, civil rights activist and dancer.


Horne joined the mike chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.


Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000.



Lena Horne, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1941.


She was the first African American performer to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio, and became famous in 1943 for her rendition of Stormy Weather in the movie of the same name. She later appeared in a number of MGM musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky, but was never featured in a leading role due to her race and the fact that films featuring her had to be reedited for showing in southern states where theatres could not show films with African-American performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were standalone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline; a notable exception was the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, though even then one of her numbers had to be cut because it was considered too suggestive by the censors. She was originally considered for the lead role in the 1951 version of Show Boat but Ava Gardner was given the role instead.

Disenchanted with Hollywood by the mid-1950s, and increasingly focused on her nightclub career, she only made two major appearances in MGM films during the decade, 1950's Duchess of Idaho (which was also Eleanor Powell's film swan song), and the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas. She returned to the screen three more times, playing Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter, Glinda the Good Witch in The Wiz (1978), with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, and co-hosting the 1994 MGM retrospective That's Entertainment! III.

In 2003, ABC announced that pop star Janet Jackson would star as Horne in a television biopic. In the weeks following Jackson's so-called "wardrobe malfunction" debacle during the 2004 Super Bowl, however, Variety reported that Horne demanded Jackson be dropped from the project. "ABC executives resisted Horne’s demand," according to the Associated Press report, "but Jackson representatives told the trade newspaper that she left willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, asked that she not take part."

In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note. Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings sound wonderful and include versions of such signature songs as Something To Live For, Chelsea Bridge and Stormy Weather." The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of My Life, was recorded in 1999 but remained unreleased for six years.

Lena Horne died on May 9, 2010, at the New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City of heart failure, according to her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by granddaughters Jenny and Amy Lumet, Lena Jones, Samadhi Jones, and grandsons, William and Thomas Jones. On May 14, 2010, Horne's funeral took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York City. Thousands gathered to mourn her, including singers Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera and actresses Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Lauren Bacall, Audra McDonald and Vanessa L. Williams. Lena was laid to rest in the Horne Family Plot at The Evergreen's Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY.






This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lena Horne".



LENA (365) 48 Tu >1 07 Singer Horne

40 We- >1 04 Actress Olin

25 Tu >1 08 Musical Horne

11 Mo >1 97 Horne or Olin

11 Th >1 09 Yakutsk's river

10 >1 99 Olin or Horne

9 Th- >1 06 Siberian river AMUR URAL

8 Tu+ >1 05 Chanteuse Horne

7 Mo >1 04 Songstress Horne

6 We- >1 99 Horne of music

6 We- >1 08 "Stormy Weather" singer Horne

6 We- >1 04 Olin of "Alias"

6 We- >1 08 Olin of "Havana"

6 We- >1 00 Tuneful Horne

6 Th- >1 05 Olin of "Chocolat"

5 We- >1 98 Russian river NEVA SEIM URAL

5 We- >1 08 River to the Laptev Sea YANA

5 Fr- >1 06 River through Yakutsk

4 >1 03 Ms. Horne

4 Mo+ >1 99 Horne of song

4 Tu+ >1 00 Diva Horne

3 Mo >1 09 Horne of "The Wiz"

3 Tu >1 00 Horne of "Stormy Weather"

3 Tu+ >1 07 Horne who sang "Stormy Weather"

3 Tu+ NYT 06 River of Siberia