When Dominique Deveraux first met Alexis Colby in episode 87 of the TV soap opera Dynasty in 1984, another high hurdle towards racial equality was overcome. Dominique was glamorous, sophisticated, wealthy and intelligent, but just as conniving as Alexis. She also just happened to be African American. Played by Diahann Carroll, who has died aged 84 of cancer, she was a match for Joan Collins’ Alexis, doubling the “nasty” in Dynasty.

Carroll was among the foremost African American actors to break down long-seated prejudices in casting. She was the first black performer to have her own sitcom, with Julia, which ran for 86 episodes (1968-71), and the first to win an Emmy in the category of best actress in a leading role in a comedy series. She also won a Tony for her performance in the Broadway musical No Strings, written especially for her by Richard Rodgers, which highlighted an interracial romance without mentioning colour.

Born in the Bronx, New York, she was the first child of John Johnson, a subway conductor, and his wife, Mabel (nee Faulk). When their daughter was an infant the family moved to Harlem, where she grew up.

She started singing at the age of six with a Harlem church choir, a few years later becoming a recipient of a Metropolitan Opera scholarship for studies at the New York High School of Music and Art. After graduating she attended New York University, majoring in sociology.

At the same time, having done modelling for Ebony magazine, she won a talent contest using the name of Diahann Carroll. This led to her performing on radio and television and in nightclubs while still in her teens. Her big break came in 1954 when Truman Capote chose her for a leading part in the Broadway musical House of Flowers, based on his short story and for which he wrote the book and lyrics. Carroll, who played a young sex worker in a Caribbean island bordello, had the best numbers, A Sleepin’ Bee and I Never Has Seen Snow.

In the same year Carroll made her film debut in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (music supplied by Georges Bizet) in which she played a friend of Dorothy Dandridge in the title role, performing in the quintet Whizzin’ Away Along De Track. Carroll was dubbed by Bernice Peterson because her own voice was not considered operatic enough, and she was dubbed again (this time by Loulie Jean Norman) as Clara, the young mother “singing” the renowned lullaby Summertime in Porgy and Bess (1959), Preminger’s big-screen adaptation of George Gershwin’s opera.

Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues (1961) presented Carroll with her first co-starring role, as an American tourist in Paris who, with her friend (Joanne Woodward) meets two fellow American jazz players (Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman). She falls for one of them, but fails to persuade him to return with her to the “racist” US (at the same time, Poitier and Carroll were having an affair in real life).

Again for Preminger, in Hurry Sundown (1967), set in rural 1940s Georgia, she played an elegant local schoolteacher who had gone north and been corrupted. Despite a terrible script, Carroll came off slightly better than her co-stars, Michael Caine and Jane Fonda, in this condescending melodrama on race relations.

After a conventional heist film, The Split (1968), in which Carroll was the wife of a robber (Jim Brown), came Claudine (1974), a romantic comedy and one of the few mainstream movies starring black actors in the 1970s that was not described as “blaxploitation”. Carroll, whom a critic described as being of an “unglamorised loveliness”, was witty, warm-hearted and self-deprecating as a Harlem widow on welfare with six children to bring up, who is courted by a garbage collector played by James Earl Jones. Surprisingly, after being Oscar-nominated as best actress for Claudine, Carroll did not return to feature films for 16 years.

The reason was her rewarding work on television, namely the popular sitcom Julia, in which she played a widowed middle-class single mother. The role came in for some criticism for being apolitical, and a far cry from the reality of most black lives. But Carroll’s positive portrayal outweighed the negative.

There followed many guest appearances in TV series and the role of Maya Angelou’s selfish mother in an adaptation of the acclaimed autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979). However, it was her role as the sleek Dominique Deveraux, which Carroll claimed made her “the first black bitch on television” in the glossy Dynasty (1984-87) and its spin-off The Colbys, that brought her greatest fame. As the character owned a music company and was a successful singer, the soap also gave Carroll the chance to display her vocal talents, already apparent from her several albums and club appearances.

Among her other TV series was A Different World (1989-93), a spin-off from The Cosby Show, in which she appeared in eight episodes as the mother of a southern belle; The Lonesome Dove (1994-95) and Grey’s Anatomy (2006-07), for which she received a Prime Time Emmy nomination.

Carroll was married and divorced four times: to the record producer Monty Kay, with whom she had a daughter, Suzanne; to a Las Vegas boutique owner, Freddie Glusman, whom she divorced on grounds of physical abuse; to a managing director of Jet magazine, Robert DeLeon, who spent large amounts of her money before dying in a car crash; and finally to the crooner Vic Damone, who neglected her for golf. She was engaged to the British broadcaster David Frost from 1971 to 1973. Much about these relationships was revealed in her memoir The Legs Are the Last to Go (2008).

She is survived by Suzanne, a journalist, and two grandchildren, August and Sydney.

• Diahann Carroll (Carol Johnson), actor and singer, born 17 July 1935; died 4 October 2019

Ronald Bergan
first published in:
www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/04/diahann-carroll-obituary