Harry Belafonte is a living legend. Today he celebrates his 95th birthday. A look at his world career.
He has a wonderful voice. Dark, somewhat hoarse and rough. When he raises them, millions of people listen spellbound. Not just when he sings. He’s gotten pretty quiet for his standards lately. Although there are certainly enough reasons to raise your voice. Maybe it’s age after all: Harry Belafonte will be 95 years old this Tuesday (March 1).
A global star and a radiant legend
He’s still a global star. One of those few radiant legends that seem to light up for eternity a time that produces interchangeable stars with half-lives of shooting stars like an assembly line. But as it is with the great legends in the will-o’-the-wisp show universe: Over time, the eye becomes clouded, you overlook the true shine.
Actually, someone like Harry Belafonte cannot be overlooked, not even on the outside. Even in his old age, he is still a remarkably handsome man. A high, almost wrinkle-free forehead rises beneath the shaved head, the brown eyes can sparkle mildly or angry as required, and with his smile he has conquered many for many decades (three wives, four children).
He has achieved everything
Actor, singer, TV entertainer, moralist – these are roughly Harry Belafonte’s fields of activity. He has become famous in every category. He has received Oscar, Grammy and numerous other awards for his work. But one honor is particularly close to his heart: the Harlem library has borne Harry Belafonte’s name since 2017. “Harlem holds a very special place in my heart and I’m honored to have a special place in Harlem now,” he said at the time.
Belafonte was born in this very New York district on March 1, 1927, the son of the sailor Harold George Bellanfanti from Martinique and the laborer Malvene Love from Jamaica. He spent four years with his two older brothers in his mother’s homeland, then the family moved back to New York, back to what was then the black ghetto. There he experienced all the discrimination that black people were subjected to. She shaped him for life.
At drama school with Marlon Brando
During the Second World War, Belafonte served in the US Navy, after his return he made his decision: he wanted to be an actor, managed to get into the famous theater school “Dramatic Workshop” run by the German actor Erwin Piscator and learned the works of Chekhov, Brecht and know Shakespeare. The young Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis and also Marlon Brando, with whom he had a lifelong friendship, studied with him.
“I wanted to be the first black Hamlet,” Harry Belafonte once said in an interview. It turned out differently. Hollywood lured – and soon he was the first black world star with films like “Bright Road”, “Carmen Jones”, “Island in the Sun”, “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” or “Odds against Tomorrow”.
His second great passion: music
At the same time, Harry Belafonte, like Frank Sinatra, lived out his second great passion: music. He was a highly talented jazz singer and worked in New York clubs with the likes of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. But with his incomparable interpretation of Caribbean folk music, he rose to the Olympus of the immortals. He was only 30 years old then. The “King of Calypso” created catchy tunes like “Island in the Sun”, “Matilda” or the super hit “Banana Boat Song”, to which half the world sang along: “Daaay-O”. In total, he has sold over 100 million records.
As a TV entertainer with his own show, he discovered celebrities like Bob Dylan himself. And Belafonte was the first to come up with the idea of recording a benefit single for starving Africa in the 1980s. This is how the “USA for Africa” project came about in 1985. The biggest American pop and rock stars (Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Cindy Lauper and many more) performed “We Are the World”. The single sold more than 20 million copies.
“This is what hell looks like – in disguise of heaven”
The human Harry Belafonte also had to deal with his dark side. “Imagine you’re a poor boy from Harlem who’s experienced racism and exclusion,” he said in an interview, “and all of a sudden everything comes flying at you: money, drugs, girls. And on an absurd scale. This is what hell looks like – in heaven’s disguise.”
He drank and he gambled. In his autobiography “My Song” he tells of his gambling addiction, which initially only his first wife, his therapist and a few friends knew about. “They were horrified when they found out that I had lost a fortune,” Belafonte said in an interview with “Bild”. He “gambled away around $100,000 several times, sometimes 50,000 or just 25,000. I was able to get rid of it with one hand.”
Suddenly he didn’t have a penny left in his pocket. “I was the best-paid artist in America at the time, but there was a situation where I had to wire the state $126,000 and left that money in the casino. I then had to take out a loan.” It was only after long discussions with his therapist that he got rid of the addiction.
Special relationship with Germany
Harry Belafonte has a very special relationship with his German audience. The Germans are his biggest fans. His first visit to Germany was burned into him. He didn’t want to come at all, the memories of the war and the Third Reich of the Nazis were still too fresh. He began his performance with a “queasy feeling”, Belafonte described to the “world”. Then he sang the Hebrew song “Hava Nageela”. The audience sang along.
“Wasn’t that strange?” he writes in his autobiography. “A German audience enthusiastically singing a Jewish folk song? Only 13 years after the war?” That was the key experience that permanently changed his view of Germany: “The gratitude, love and warmth that this German audience showed me is one of the best memories of my career.”
He fights against poverty, racism, pollution
The political and social moralist Harry Belafonte leaves the most lasting impression. Since his youth he has been fighting against poverty, racism, pollution in the USA and around the world. He was close friends with the black civil rights activist Martin Luther King, who was murdered in 1968, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the 32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Robert F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. The “King of Calypso” had become a singing civil rights activist who was appointed ambassador by UNICEF.
But when given the chance to become New York’s first black senator, Belafonte turned it down. Why? “When you get into politics you have to be willing to compromise. Politicians negotiate interests and I didn’t want to negotiate about something I believe in. I wanted to fight for it. The platform I have is much more powerful than the one I would have had as a Senator. Artists are the most powerful source in the universe and the keepers of truth.”
Strong words against Bush
Belafonte can get angry. He accused US President George W. Bush of terrorism and once said in the “Bild am Sonntag”: “Who gives us the right to kill the people in Iraq? Bush claims that America is hunting terrorists for the first time terrorism is part of the American system. America destroyed an entire race, the Indians. That is terror.” He described then-Secretary of State Colin Powell as a “house slave” who obeyed his master Bush without question or opinion.
Disappointed in Barack Obama
Harry Belafonte was also disappointed with President Barack Obama. “He lacks a fundamental empathy for those who really don’t have anything. It doesn’t matter if they’re black or white… I have put hope in every good president, not because of the color of his skin, but because of what makes him as a human. I don’t feel like Obama can be anything more than a human, so it makes no difference that he’s a black president.”
Ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, Belafonte spoke out against Donald Trump. In the “New York Timeshe shared his thoughts. Black people have lost their safety “since this president is behind the police who are killing us in the streets”.
Big party
A celebration is to be held for Belafonte’s 95th birthday under the title “HB95”. The charity evening in New York will also feature the awards ceremony for the social justice organization Sankofa, which the activist co-founded. Some famous personalities come together for this. According to US media reports, guests include John Legend, Laurence Fishburne and Lenny Kravitz.