Harry Belafonte was a Jamaican-American singer, actor, and campaigner who popularised calypso music among international audiences in the 1950s. Calypso (1956), his breakthrough album, was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.
Sadly, Belafonte died of congestive heart failure on April 25, 2023, at the age of 96, at home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Who was Marguerite Belafonte?
Marguerite Belafonte is an American actress most famous for her role in Night of the Quarter Moon (1959). Marguerite Belafonte was born in Washington, DC on October 12, 1923.
While serving in the Navy in Virginia in 1944, Belafonte met his future first wife Marguerite.
In a 1996 feature of the singer in The New Yorker, the former marriage was described as an “odd couple.” According to the site, Belafonte and Marguerite were from different socioeconomic classes, and as a sorority sister from a middle-class household, Marguerite found it difficult to understand her husband. She previously stated, “Our courtship was one long argument over racial issues.”
They married on June 18, 1948, and had two daughters, Adrienne and Shari Belafonte. They divorced in 1954, while Marguerite was pregnant with Shari.
The couple’s marriage was already in danger when Belafonte made the 1954 film Carmen Jones, where he met the woman he would later marry, dancer Julie Robinson. Marguerite discovered love messages Robinson wrote to her husband shortly after Shari was born, and their divorce was rapid.
Before, during, and after her marriage to Belafonte, Marguerite had her own career. She had a brief acting career, even appearing as a hostess in the 1959 film Night of the Quarter Moon. Marguerite also attended the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg, and later told The New Yorker that she and Belafonte had lifestyles that were diametrically opposed. She said, “I just found the show-biz world to be shallow, and false. And, more and more, that was his whole life.”
What was Marguerite Belafonte cause of death?
On February 15, 1998, Harry Belafonte’s ex-wife passed away from heart disease.
