On Tuesday, October 1, the “replacement” Oscar will be presented to Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts during a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.” McDaniel was the first black actress in history to win an Academy Award. She got it for the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s maid – Mammy. After her historic win, it would be 51 years before another black woman won an Oscar for acting. It was Whoopi Goldberg for “Ghost Believe” in 1991.
“I’d rather play a maid than be one”
It was Clark Gable, playing Rhett Butler, who persuaded the actress to audition for the role of Mammy in “Gone with the Wind.” Later, he forced the set to remove signs regarding racial segregation and threatened to leave the cast. At the Oscars, however, McDaniel had to sit separately, away from the film’s other nominees, in a segregated Cocoanut Grove area of the Ambassador Hotel. Due to the fact that the hotel was “whites only”, it was only after the studio’s intervention that the actress was even invited. She was sitting at a table with an agent and a security guard.
While accepting the Oscar, McDaniel said her win “made me feel very, very humbled and I will always look at it as a beacon in everything I may do in the future. I sincerely hope that I will always be a credit to my race and the film industry.” “.
She won an Oscar, but it was lost in the 1960s.
After her death in 1952, the award – a plaque, not a statuette, as such was awarded to supporting actors at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s – went to Howard University, as McDaniel had wished. The award was displayed in the university’s theater department until the late 1960s, but the Academy says it is unknown where it is now
Based on the famous novel by Margaret Mitchell, the drama “Gone with the Wind” won eight Oscars, including Best Picture. The plot was set during the Civil War, hence the inevitable presence of racist themes. . McDaniel did not comment on racial issues then or later. “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make seven dollars a week,” the actress once said.
Source: Gazeta
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