Barrier-breaking jazz star, actress Lena Horne dies at 92

Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress known for her plaintive, signature song Stormy Weather and for her triumph over the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not to socialise with them, has died. She was 92.

Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, said hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin, who would not release details.

Quincy Jones, a longtime friend and collaborator, was among those mourning her death Monday. He called her a "pioneering groundbreaker".

"Our friendship dated back more than 50 years and continued up until the last moment, her inner and outer beauty immediately bonding us forever," said Jones, who noted that they worked together on the film The Wiz and a Grammy-winning live album.

'She was a pioneer'

"Lena Horne was a pioneering groundbreaker, making inroads into a world that had never before been explored by African-American women, and she did it on her own terms," he added. "Our nation and the world has lost one of the great artistic icons of the 20th century. There will never be another like Lena Horne and I will miss her deeply."

"I knew her from the time I was born, and whenever I needed anything, she was there. She was funny, sophisticated and truly one of a kind. We lost an original. Thank you Lena," Liza Minnelli said Monday. Her father, director Vincente Minnelli, brought Horne to Hollywood to star in Cabin in the Sky in 1943.

Horne, whose striking beauty often overshadowed her talent and artistry, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success: "I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, to play at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City, and when she signed with MGM, she was among a handful of black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical, Stormy Weather. Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her most famous tune.

Horne had an impressive musical range, from jazz and blues to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in such songs as The Lady Is a Tramp and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. In 1942's Panama Hattie, her first movie with MGM, she sang Cole Porter's Just One of Those Things, winning critical acclaim.

In her first big Broadway success, as the star of Jamaica in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs."

"It's just a great loss," said Janet Jackson in an interview on Monday. "She brought much joy into everyone's lives - even the younger generations, younger than myself. She was such a great talent. She opened up such doors for artistes like myself."

Against racism

Horne was perpetually frustrated with racism.

"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out. It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.

While at MGM, Horne starred in the all-black Cabin in the Sky, but in most movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut when shown in the South and she was denied major roles and speaking parts. Horne, who had appeared in the role of Julie in a Show Boat scene in a 1946 movie about Jerome Kern, seemed a logical choice for the 1951 movie, but the part went to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not sing.

"Metro's cowardice deprived the musical (genre) of one of the great singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.

"She was a very angry woman," said film critic-author-documentarian Richard Schickel, who worked with Horne on her 1965 autobiography.

"It's something that shaped her life to a very high degree. She was a woman who had a very powerful desire to lead her own life, to not be cautious and to speak out. And she was a woman, also, who felt in her career that she had been held back by the issue of race. So she had a lot of anger and disappointment about that."

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in black society. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book, The Hornes: An American Family, that among their relatives was Frank Horne, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

- AP