Diahann Carroll

Carroll also had a recurring role on the NBC sitcom A Different World as Whitley Gilbert's (Jasmine Guy) mother. Jane Darwell has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures, at 6735 Hollywood Boulevard. She has also starred in the series Dynasty and The Colbys. She died from a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California and was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery. In 1974 she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Claudine. Always popular within the film industry, her final role as the old woman feeding the birds in Mary Poppins was personally given to her by Walt Disney. Opera singer Loulie Jean Norman provided Carroll's singing voice. By the end of her career she had appeared in more than 170 films, including Huckleberry Finn (1931), Roman Scandals (1933), Jesse James, The Rains Came, Gone With the Wind (all 1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Caged (1950).

and Pearl Bailey. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a role she was given at the insistence of the film's star, Henry Fonda. In 1959, she played Clara in the film version of Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess along with such distinguished actors as Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr. Short, stout and plain faced she was quickly cast in a succession of films usually as the mother of one of the major characters. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for the role. After a 15 year absence from films, she resumed her film career in 1930 with a role in Tom Sawyer, and her career as a Hollywood character actress began. Her first film role was in Carmen Jones in 1954, but her big break came when she became the first African American actress to star in her own television series in which she did not play a domestic worker, when Julia debuted in 1968. She appeared in almost twenty films over the next two years before returning to the stage.

Born Carol Diahann Johnson in The Bronx, New York, she attended the New York City High School of the Performing Arts, along with schoolmate Billy Dee Williams. She began her acting career in theater productions in Chicago and made her first film appearance in 1913. Diahann Carroll (born July 15, 1935) is an American actress and singer. Born Patti Woodward in Palmyra, Missouri, Darwell originally intended to become a circus performer, however her family objected and she compromised by becoming an actress. No Strings (1962) in the part of Barbara Woodruff. Jane Darwell (October 15, 1879 – August 13, 1967) was an American theater and film actress. House of Flowers (1954) in the part of Ottilie.