R.I.P. Ellen Holly, pioneering soap opera star

Ellen Holly, who became the first prominent Black female actor on a soap opera, died in her sleep Wednesday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, according to her publicist Cheryl L. Duncan (via The Hollywood Reporter). She was 92 years old.

A New York native, Holly became involved in theater while attending Hunter College. Her first starring role on Broadway was Too Late The Phalarope, in which she darkened her skin to play a South African bush girl who has a sexual relationship with a white policeman. After receiving acclaim for the role, she joined the Actors Studio and appeared in Broadway shows like Face Of A Hero, Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, and A Hand Is On The Gate, acting against such stars as Jack Lemmon, Cecily Tyson, and James Earl Jones.

As a light-skinned Black woman, Holly was frustrated with the opportunities afforded by the entertainment industry, feeling that she was only ever offered white passing roles. In 1968, the New York Times published part of a letter she’d written as an op-ed under the headline “How Black Do You Have To Be?” She wrote, “We are told that we are not Black enough, that we look too white. But we are Black. It is enough for us, why isn’t it enough for you?”

The piece caught the attention of One Life To Live creator Agnes Nixon, who created for Holly the role of Carla Benari. Holly had input on Benari’s storyline, about a seemingly white woman in a love triangle with a white doctor and a Black intern. However, several months into her tenure on the show, it was revealed that Carla herself had a Black mother.

Holly spent more than a decade on One Life To Live before exiting in 1980 because of her dissatisfaction with her salary; she was brought back with a pay raise in 1983, but was eventually let go in 1985. She went on to notably appear in Spike Lee’s School Daze and had a role on the soap opera Guiding Light in the late ’80s to early ’90s. However, she largely retired from Hollywood by the early 2000s. She penned an autobiography, One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress, and became a librarian at a public library in White Plains, N.Y. According to Entertainment Weekly, she was also working on a documentary about her life and family, “which included abolitionists, U.S. ambassadors, and pioneering Black women in such fields as medicine and education.”

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Holly is survived by her grand-nieces, Alexa and Ashley, and their father, Xavier; and her first cousins, Wanda, Julie, Carolyn and Clinton. Donations in her memory may be made to The Obama Presidential Center or St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. R.I.P.