3/30/2023 0 Comments Maya angelou barbieShe spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who was kind enough to sing a lullaby to Angelou's son Guy, surly enough to heckle her off the stage and astute enough to tell her: 'You're going to be famous. By her mid-20s, she was performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing with another future star, Phyllis Diller. In her early 20s, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel, was married (to Enistasious Tosh Angelos, her first of three husbands) and then divorced. And I read every book, even if I didn't understand it.'Īt age 9, she was writing poetry. And then I started reading, really reading, at about 7 1/2, because a woman in my town took me to the library, a black school library. ![]() And "Deep River." Ooh! Even now it can catch me. 'I just seemed to me the most wonderful way of talking. She mastered several languages and published not just poetry, but advice books, cookbooks and children's stories.Īngelou, a born performer, worked as a nightclub dancer, an actress, a singer - and even a prostitute before finding fame. ![]() She was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended when Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared on her friend's talk show program. She told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she would be watching it on television 'somewhere between crying and praying and being grateful and laughing when I see faces I know.' But a few days before Obama's inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She remained close enough to the Clintons that in 2008 she supported Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy over the ultimately successful run of the country's first black president, Barack Obama. Bush, she read another poem, 'Amazing Peace,' at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House. Her confident performance openly delighted Clinton and made the poem a best-seller, if not a critical favorite. In 1993, she was a sensation reading her cautiously hopeful "On the Pulse of the Morning" at former President Bill Clinton's first inauguration. The childhood victim of rape wrote a million-selling memoir, befriended Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and performed on stages around the world.Īn actress, singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s, she broke through as an author in 1970 with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became standard (and occasionally censored) reading, and was the first of a multipart autobiography that continued through the decades. The young single mother who performed at strip clubs to earn a living later wrote and recited the most popular presidential inaugural poem in history. Tall and regal, with a deep, majestic voice, Angelou defied all probability and category, becoming one of the first black women to enjoy mainstream success as an author and thriving in virtually every artistic medium.
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