Harry Belafonte, legendary singer, actor, and civil rights activist, dies at 96
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Harry Belafonte, the Grammy-, Emmy-, Tony-, and honorary Oscar-winning entertainer whose 1956 hit "Banana Boat (Day-O)" brought calypso music into the mainstream, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.
Ken Sunshine, Belafonte's longtime representative, confirmed to EW that Belafonte died of congestive heart failure.
Belafonte rose to prominence as an entertainer in the 1950s, appearing in films like Carmen Jones (1954), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), and The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) amid a successful music career which skyrocketed with the release of the 1955 album Belafonte.
Despite his many successes, Belafonte saw himself first and foremost as "a civil rights warrior." From his close friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr. to his sustained humanitarian work later in life, Belafonte remained a crusader for social justice till the end. Off screen, Belafonte marched alongside King, Jr. and was named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1987. His humanitarian work led to him receiving an honorary Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, from the Academy in 2014.
Archive Photos/Getty Images Harry Belafonte
The son of Jamaican immigrants living in Harlem, Belafonte — born on March 1, 1927 — began his career in the 1940s, singing in New York City clubs to pay for classes at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, where he studied alongside Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier.
He made acting history twice: He was the first black man to win a Tony (in 1954 for Almanac) and the first to win an Emmy (in 1959 for An Evening with Belafonte). But he enjoyed even greater success as a chart-topping musician. His 1956 breakthrough album, Calypso, was the first LP ever to sell one million copies and earned Belafonte the nickname "King of Calypso" — a title he never fully embraced. His massive crossover appeal was unparalleled in those early days of the civil rights movement, and to this day, Belafonte remains one of the best-selling recording artists in history.
Throughout his life, Belafonte regularly combined art with (often controversial) social activism. In his 1967 drama, Island in the Sun, he played a man contemplating a romance with a white woman (Joan Fontaine). In 1985, he organized USA for Africa, singing on the Grammy-winning single, "We Are the World."
Though he gave up performing in 2007 to concentrate on his work as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, Belafonte completed a 12-part documentary about his life in 2009. His final onscreen work included a part in Spike Lee's Best Picture-nominated 2018 film BlackKkKlansman and a 2020 documentary, The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show, which examined his groundbreaking fill-in slot at the Tonight Show desk in 1968.
"You can cage the singer, but not the song," he famously said in 1988. Likewise, Belafonte's message of freedom lives on.
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