Madame Sul-Te-Wan
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Madame Sul-Te-Wan (March 7, 1873 - February 1, 1959) was the stage name of an African-American stage and film actress whose career spanned over five decades.
Born Nellie Crawford in Louisville, Kentucky, her parents were freed slaves. Her father, Silas Crawford, left the family early in Sul-Te-Wan's life and her mother, Cleo De Londa, became a laundress who found employment working for Louisville stage actresses. The young Nellie became enchanted by watching the young actresses rehearse when she delivered laundry for her mother. Nellie moved to Cincinnati and joined a theatrical company called Three Black Cloaks, and began billing herself as Creole Nell. She also formed her own theatrical companies and toured the East Coast. After moving to California, Madame Sul-Te-Wan began her acting career in uncredited roles in director D.W. Griffith's controversial 1915 drama Birth of a Nation and the colossal 1916 epic Intolerance. Sul-Te-Wan had allegedly written Griffith a letter of introduction after hearing that Griffith was shooting a film in her hometown in Kentucky.
Sul-Te-Wan married Robert Reed Conley during the early 1900s and had three sons. Conley, however, abandoned the family soon after the birth of their third son.
Following her roles for Griffith, Madame Sul-Te-Wan followed up in 1916 with a role in the Anita Loos penned drama The Children Pay with the young actress Lillian Gish and in 1917 with Gish's sister Dorothy in the Edward Morrissey directed drama Stage Struck.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Madame Sul-Te-Wan would establish herself as a rather publicly recognizable character actress, most often appearing in "Mammy" roles alongside such popular actors of the silent film era as: Tom Mix, Leatrice Joy, Matt Moore, Mildred Harris, Harry Carey, Robert Harron and Mae Marsh. Some of her most memorable roles of the era were in the 1927 James W. Horne directed Buster Keaton comedy College, and in the 1929 Erich von Stroheim directed drama Queen Kelly, starring Gloria Swanson.
Madame Sul-Te-Wan transitioned into the talkie era with relative ease and continued to appear in high profile films alongside such prominent film actors as: Conrad Nagel, Barbara Stanwyck, Fay Wray, Richard Barthelmess, Jane Wyman, Luise Rainer, Melvyn Douglas, Lucille Ball, Veronica Lake and Claudette Colbert. However, as a black woman in the era of segregation, she was consistently limited to appearing in roles as minor characters who were usually convicts, "native women", or domestic servants, such as her role as a cook in the 1933 box-office hit King Kong. Despite the motion picture industries' limitations for African-American performers, Sul-Te-Wan worked consistently throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1937, Sul-Te-Wan was cast in the memorable role of 'Tituba' in the film Maid of Salem, a dramatic retelling of the events surrounding of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The film starred Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, Gale Sondergaard, Pedro de Cordoba and Louise Dresser and was rather financially successful and Sul-Te-Wan's performance garnered critical praise.
In 1954, Madame Sul-Te-Wan appeared in the Otto Preminger directed and nearly entirely African-American cast musical drama Carmen Jones opposite Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll and Pearl Bailey as Dandridge's grandmother. The film marked a departure for Sul-Te-Wan, who after appearing onscreen for over four decades, was finally able to act in a role that was atypical of her usual "Mammy" roles. The pairing of Dandridge and Sul-Te-Wan in Carmen Jones spawned a still widely believed but erroneous rumor - that Sul-Te-Wan was Dandridge's actual grandmother (some allege that she is Dandridge's great-grandmother). However, there is no merit to the claim and the two women are unrelated.
During the 1950s (Sul-Te-Wan now in her 80s), she continued to appear onscreen in a number of well-received films, albeit now mostly in smaller bit parts and often uncredited. Her last screen appearance came in the 1958 Anthony Quinn directed adventure film The Buccaneer, starring Yul Brynner.
Madame Sul-Te-Wan died at the age of 85 in Hollywood, California and was interred at the Pierce Brothers' Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, California.
[edit] Quotes
- "I'd rather play a maid than be one." - Madame Sul-Te-Wan defending what some critics had called "demeaning roles" for African-Americans.
- "We never did discover the origin of her name. No one was bold enough to ask." - actress Lillian Gish.
[edit] References
- The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business 1865-1910 by Henry T. Sampson, Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ., 1988)
- Black Women in America An Historical Encyclopedia. Volumes 1 and 2. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Copyright 1993, Carlson Publishing Inc., Brooklyn, New York ISBN 0-926019-61-9
- Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams by Donald Bogle. The Story of Black Hollywood.
