The legendary US singer, actor and entertainer Harry Belafonte is dead. He died at the age of 96, as the agency of his longtime spokesman Ken Sunshine confirmed to the German Press Agency on Tuesday. The New York Times had previously reported.
Belafonte rose to prominence as the singer of songs such as the calypso hit “Banana Boat Song.” He acted in more than 40 films and was always politically involved. He fought alongside Martin Luther King Jr. for black civil rights in the USA, with Nelson Mandela against apartheid in South Africa and as a UNICEF ambassador for children in Haiti and Sudan.
Belafonte won an honorary Oscar and numerous other awards. For his 90th birthday, his hometown of New York even named an entire library in Harlem after him. Belafonte was born in the Black Quarter of Harlem in 1927, but spent much of his youth in his mother’s Jamaican homeland.
He would have liked to have become the “first black Hamlet”, as he once said in an interview. Instead, it became Hollywood with films like Bright Road (1953) and Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954). Music was added and Belafonte, son of a Martinique ship’s cook and a Jamaican laborer, became the “calypso king”.
