Singer and actress Lena Horne's main occupation was nightclub hosting, a profession she pursued successfully around the world for over 60 years, from the 1930s Alongside her club work, she also maintained a recording career that spanned from 1936 to 2000 and earned her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several short films between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and performed on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African American woman facing personal and professional discrimination during a period of enormous social change in the United States. His first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where black people could perform. , but not be admitted as a client; In 1969, when she starred in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage to a white man went unnoticed in the storyline. Horne herself played a central role in changing attitudes toward race in the 20th century; her middle-class upbringing and musical training predisposed her to the popular music of her era, rather than the blues and jazz genres more commonly associated with African Americans, and her photogenic appearance was close enough to that of Caucasians that she is often encouraged to try to "pass" as white, which she has always refused to do. But his position in the midst of a social struggle allowed him to become a leader in that struggle, speaking out for racial integration and raising money for civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back on a life that had never been short of conflict, but could ultimately be seen as a triumph.Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born on June 30, 1917, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of New York. . Both sides of his family claimed a mix of African Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians, and both were part of what black leader W.E.B. DuBois called "the talented tenth," the upper stratum of the American black population. composed of middle classes. , well-educated African Americans. His parents, however, could both be described as non-conformists of this tradition. His father, Edwin Fletcher Horne Jr., worked for the New York State Department of Labor, but one of his biographers describes him more accurately as "a 'numbers' banker": his real profession was gambling...