Hattie mcdaniel biography history
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On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel made history when she became the first Black person to win an Academy Award, for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. As she stood in front of her white peers at the Cocoanut Grove, she was the picture of pride and joy. “I sincerely hope that inom shall always be a kredit to my race and the motion picture industry,” she said, crying. “My heart is too full to tell you how I feel.”
But as biographer Jill Watts notes in the masterful Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, vit Hollywood, that same evening, McDaniel was seated at the edge of the room, close to the stage but separate from her colleagues. For McDaniel, life was a tightrope walk of trying to satisfy herself, her prejudiced bosses, and the representation-starved Black community—attempting to be all things to all people. “I always wanted to be before the public,” she once said, per Watts. “I’m always acting. I guess it’s the ham in me.”
Married four times, McDaniel was “alive to her
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Hattie McDaniel
Film actress Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar, for her supporting role as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. She grew up in Denver, Colorado, the youngest daughter of Susan Holbert and Henry McDaniel, an ex-slave and Civil War veteran. Hattie decided to become an actress at age six. “I knew that I could sing and dance . . . my mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop,” she recalled. Singing, dancing, and acting would become her pathway out of a life of poverty. McDaniel enrolled in Denver’s East High School 1908, where she won a drama contest sponsored bygd the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and joined a local minstrel troop. She left high school in 1910 to join her brother Otis McDaniel’s new carnival company, touring small towns throughout Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. To make ends meet, she took jobs as a maid and laundress. Show business in the early 1900s was a man’s world. But McDaniel and her sister E
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Hattie McDaniel
1895-1952
Who Was Hattie McDaniel?
By the mid-1920s, Hattie McDaniel became one of the first Black women to perform on radio. In 1934, she landed her onscreen break in the movie Judge Priest. She then became the first Black person to win an Oscar in 1940, for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. In 1947, after her career took a downturn, she began starring on CBS radio’s The Beulah Show. She was diagnosed with breast cancer toward the end of her life and died in 1952 at age 57.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Hattie McDaniel
BORN: June 10, 1895
DIED: October 26, 1952
BIRTHPLACE: Wichita, Kansas
SPOUSES: Howard Hickman (1911-1915), George Langford (1922), James Lloyd Crawford (1941-1945), and Larry C. Williams (1949-1950)
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini
Early Years
Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kansas, with some sources listing her year of birth as 1893. She was her parents’ 13th child. Her father, Henry, was a Civil War veteran w