Fredi Washington Bio/Wiki, Net Worth, Married 2018
Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington (December 23, 1903 – June 28, 1994) was an accomplished African-American dramatic film actress, one of the first to gain recognition for her work in film and on stage. She was active during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1930s). She is best known for her role as "Peola" in the 1934 version of the film Imitation of Life, in which she plays a young mulatto woman. Her last film role was in One Mile from Heaven (1937), after which she left Hollywood and returned to New York to work in theatre and civil rights.
Why should I have to pass for anything...but an artist?
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I have never tried to pass for white and never had any desire. I am proud of my race. In Imitation of Life (1934), I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances but I am not showing how I felt. I was slightly uncomfortable while making the scene where I stood before the mirror asking, "Am I not white?" No person who strives to be the least bit intelligent should allow a thing like color, something for which none of us is responsible, to mar his life or influence his judgment.
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If they want me, they will call me, and if they accept me, they'll have to take me as I am. FW, on why she preferred the stage
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[when asked why she didn't try to "pass" for white] Because I'm honest and because you don't have to be white to be good.
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Fact
1
Turning down a contract at Universal for fear of being typed in servile roles, she later played a black mother raising a white child in the excellent film One Mile from Heaven (1937).
2
Sister of Isabel Washington, a stage actress. They appeared together as dancers in the New York's stage version of Maugham's "The Letter" (1929) and later "Singin' the Blues" in 1931.
3
A well-spoken advocate on equal rights, from 1942-1948 she was an editor and columnist for The People's Voice, a weekly newspaper started by Baptist minter-cum-politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the husband of Fredi's sister Isabel. She also was involved in the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts.
4
First job was at a Harlem dress shop for $17 a week. She later found a job as a bookkeeper at W.C. Handy's Black Swan Records Company.
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The mid-1930s were her most productive film years playing the lead in The Emperor Jones (1933) opposite Paul Robeson, the lead in the voodoo drama Ouanga (1936) and, her most famous role, Peola Johnson, who turns against her black mother (Louise Beavers) in an effort to pass for white, in the Claudette Colbert starrer Imitation of Life (1934).
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Her mother died when Fredi was 11 and the young girl was sent to St. Elizabeth's Convent in Pennsylvania until her maternal grandmother brought her to New York's Harlem district.
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Met band leader Duke Ellington while playing his girlfriend in the two-reeler short Black and Tan (1929) and fell hard for the already-married musician. Heartsick, she later married Ellington's trombonist Lawrence Brown on the rebound in 1933.
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Billed as "Edith Warren" in the Broadway show "Black Boy" in 1926 starring Paul Robeson. It was here that the light-skinned, green-eyed beauty first played her archetypal half caste role in which the character tries to pass for white. According to Laura Wagner's article on Fredi, she met Paul Robeson and began an on-and-off again relationship with Robeson that lasted two decades.
9
Refused several would-be benefactors who tried to persuade her to pass for white on stage and in films.
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She broke into entertainment in the all-black Broadway musical "Shuffle Along" in 1922 as a chorus girl and toured with the road show for two years. Her film debut came that same year in the all-black boxing drama Square Joe (1922). She also performed in nightclubs both here and abroad, once performing in a dance act called "Moiret and Fredi" with Al Moiret.
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For better or worse, she was stereotyped as the "tragic mulatto", never better than as Peola, the light-skinned daughter of Louise Beavers in Imitation of Life (1934) who tries to pass for white. So realistic was her portrayal that many filmgoers thought she was antiblack in real life.
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A longtime advocate for civil rights, she was administrative secretary for the Joint Actors Equity-Theater League Committee on Hotel Accommodations for Negro Actors throughout the United States.
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As a co-founder of the Negro Actors Guild, the Guild's officers at the time included Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was married to her sister Isabel Washington. Later Fredi was editor and columnist for "The People's Voice", a weekly paper founded by Powell in 1938. She wrote the regular features "Headlines and Footlights" And "Fredi Speaks".
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She moved to New York at the age of 16 and started her career as a chorus girl two years later at the Alabam Club. She spent four years (1922-1926) in the landmark play "Shuffle Along".
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Attended St. Elizabeth Convent in Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania, and later, for dramatic training, the Egri School of Dramatic Writing and the Christopher School of Languages.
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In the 1940s and early 1950s, she actively participated in the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts.
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Played the lead opposite Paul Robeson in the Broadway play "Black Boy" under the (then) stage name of Edith Warren. She later worked with Robeson again in The Emperor Jones (1933), in which her skin was darkened with makeup for fear that audiences might think Robeson was actually filming love scenes with a white woman.
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Was the third of nine children.
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First husband was Lawrence Brown, a trombonist in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Following their divorce in 1951 she married Connecticut dentist Hugh Anthony Bell, and retired. She worked at the Stamford branch of Bloomingdale's from 1954 to 1980.
$19 Million
