Ellen Holly, Who Challenged Racial Barriers on Daytime TV, Dies at 92
The first Black performer to play a lead role on a soap opera, she spurred controversy on “One Life to Live” in the late 1960s.
Alex Williams and
Ellen Holly, the first Black actor to play a lead role on daytime television, who broke barriers and sparked controversy on the soap opera “One Life to Live” starting in the late 1960s as a woman presumed to be white who becomes enmeshed in a love triangle involving a Black man, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.
Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, announced the death. No cause was given.
Ms. Holly, who faced difficulties getting roles early in her career as a light-skinned Black woman, became a fixture on “One Life,” an ABC daytime staple, from 1968 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1985.
She originally appeared on the show as a woman with a murky past, calling herself Carla Benari, who is treated by a white doctor, James Craig (Robert Milli), after experiencing a nervous breakdown. From the outset, the character, who is presumed to be Italian American, raised questions in the minds of viewers.
“She wasn’t the usual blond, blue-eyed leading female,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 video interview. “She looked very exotic, and she had this very exotic name.”
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Carla begins working as a receptionist for Dr. Craig and dating a Black intern, Dr. Price Trainor (Peter De Anda). She finds herself enmeshed in a mixed-race love triangle when Dr. Craig falls for her as well.
The plotline proved provocative in a country where racial tensions were bubbling over after years of bloody struggles during the civil rights era and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”
Not all viewers were happy to go along for the ride. A station in Lubbock, Texas, canceled “One Life to Live,” the show’s creator, Agnes Nixon, said in a 1997 video interview, and some viewers wrote angry letters. A man in Seattle, she said, sent a rambling letter protesting a scene in which Carla kissed Dr. Trainor. “But I’m getting confused,” Ms. Nixon recalled him stating. “If she turns out to be Black, I want to protest her kissing the white doctor.”
The show eventually revealed that Carla’s real last name was Gray and that she was the runaway daughter a widowed Black woman, Sadie Gray (Lillian Hayman), another long-running character on the show. Carla, it turned out, had been chasing stardom as an actress, but she had failed to find success as a Black woman, even after passing herself off as white.
The plotline had particular resonance for Ms. Holly, who herself identified as Black but also had French, English and Shinnecock ancestry. She originally caught Ms. Nixon’s attention after writing a lengthy letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times in 1968 about the difficulties faced by actors like her who had lighter skin, and whom some critics deemed not Black enough.
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“Black is not a color of skin, it is a state of mind,” Ms. Holly wrote. “However white I might appear,” she added, “I am Black because my experience has been a Black experience. From the time I first went to school, got called the usual ugly names and learned the brutal realities of being an outsider, no day has been without its traumas — jobs I could not qualify for because I was Black, apartments I could not rent, opportunities I was denied.”
In a guest column in The Times York Times the next year, Ms. Holly wrote that she had not been optimistic when initially approached about the role. “If you’re Black, you don’t get white parts, and if you’re a ‘Black who looks white’ you don’t get Black parts either.”
“What most people don’t realize,” she continued, “is that even when there’s a part for a ‘Black who looks white,’ it never goes to a Black person, but to a white one. Follow? I know … I know … it’s hard for me, too.”
Ellen Virginia Holly was born on Jan. 16, 1931, in Manhattan, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her father, William Garnet Holly, was a chemical engineer, and her mother, Grayce Holly, was a writer. She came from a long line of activists, including Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a maternal aunt, who was the only woman on the planning committee for the landmark civil rights March on Washington in 1963 and a founding member of the National Organization for Women.
After graduating from Hunter College in New York, Ms. Holly began her acting career in stage productions in New York and Boston. She made her Broadway debut in 1956 in “Too Late the Phalarope,” a play set in South Africa, and went on to perform in several other Broadway productions.
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From the late 1950s through the early ’70s, Ms. Holly played prominent roles in productions at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, according to the site BroadwayWorld. Over the course of her career, she appeared alongside notables including James Earl Jones, Jack Lemmon, Cicely Tyson and a young Laurence Fishburne, who in the 1970s played Carla’s troubled adopted son on “One Life to Live.”
In addition to her career-defining role on that show, Ms. Holly was seen on 59 episodes of another soap opera, “Guiding Light,” between 1988 and 1993, and popped up in the Spike Lee film “School Daze” (1988) and on the television series “In the Heat of the Night” and “Spenser: For Hire.”
She also made her mark as a writer, producing opinion columns for The Times about the arts, race and civil rights. In 1996 she published “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress.” In the 1990s, after retiring from acting, she worked at the White Plains Public Library for many years.
Ms. Holly never married or had children. Her survivors include several cousins, grand-nieces and other family members.
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While “One Life to Live” made Ms. Holly’s face a fixture in living rooms around the country for years, it represented more than a personal triumph for her. As she wrote in The Times in 1969, “I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could.”
Unlike the audience for a play or movie, she wrote, viewers followed her character every day for months, so “the emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater, and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial.”
“A lot of whites who think they aren’t prejudiced — are,” she added. “It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to confront their own prejudices.”
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