Diahann Carroll

Diahann Carroll was an American actress, singer, model, and activist whose six-decade career produced multiple defining 20th-century American TV and film roles — particularly her 1968–1971 lead role as nurse Julia Baker on NBC's Julia, the first American TV series to star an African-American woman in a non-stereotypical lead role. She was born Carol Diahann Johnson on July 17, 1935, in The Bronx, New York City, into an African-American family. Her father John Johnson was a New York City Subway conductor and her mother Mabel Faulk Johnson was a homemaker.

Her education at the High School of Music & Art in New York and her brief NYU studies launched her early-1950s American TV-and-Broadway career. Her 1954 Broadway debut at age 19 in the Truman Capote and Harold Arlen musical House of Flowers produced her 1954 Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Her 1962 Broadway lead role as Barbara Woodruff in Richard Rodgers's No Strings — for which she won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the first African-American actress ever to win the Tony Award in that category — launched her American TV-and-film career.

Her 1968–1971 NBC TV series Julia — in which she played widowed African-American nurse Julia Baker, raising her young son Corey alone after her husband's death in the Vietnam War — produced 86 episodes across three NBC TV seasons and launched the late-1960s and 1970s American TV-network non-stereotypical African-American character representation. The series produced her 1969 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a TV Series – Comedy.

Her subsequent film career produced multiple defining American films — particularly the 1974 Diana Ross documentary Mahogany (in which she did not appear, but which she had previously been considered for), the 1974 Sidney Poitier romantic-comedy Claudine (for which she earned the 1975 Best Actress Academy Award nomination — only the fourth African-American actress ever nominated for the Academy Award in that category at the time), and her 1984–1987 four-season run as wealthy widow Dominique Deveraux on ABC's prime-time drama TV series Dynasty. She married music producer Vic Damone (her fourth husband) in 1987. She died on October 4, 2019, at age 84, in Los Angeles, of breast cancer.

Her name Diahann began as a personally-modified spelling of Diane (from the Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt). Diahann has been a rare but enduring African-American girls' name across the 20th century.