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Harry Belafonte (1927-2023)

Alias:
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.

Birthplace:
New York City, New York, USA

Born:
March 1, 1927

Died:
April 25, 2023

Biography from TheMovieDB

Harry Belafonte (born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.; March 1, 1927 – April 25, 2023) was an American singer, actor and activist, who popularized calypso music with international audiences in the 1950s. Belafonte is one of the few performers to have received an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT), although he won the Oscar in a non-competitive category. He earned his career breakthrough with the album Calypso (1956), which was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.  Belafonte was best known for his recordings of "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)", "Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)", "Jamaica Farewell", and "Mary's Boy Child". He recorded and performed in many genres, including blues, folk, gospel, show tunes, and American standards. He also starred in films such as Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Buck and the Preacher (1972), and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). He made his final screen appearance in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018).  Belafonte considered the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson a mentor, and he was a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was a vocal critic of the policies of the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations. Belafonte acted as the American Civil Liberties Union celebrity ambassador for juvenile justice issues.  Belafonte won three Grammy Awards (including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award), an Emmy Award, and a Tony Award. In 1989, he received the Kennedy Center Honors. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994. In 2014, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy's 6th Annual Governors Awards and in 2022 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category.  Description above from the Wikipedia article Harry Belafonte, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

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Additional information:

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E*G*O*T (First Awards)
EmmyGrammyOscarTony
1960196120141954
(EGOTs may include competitive and noncompetitive awards.)

Film Performances

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Film Production

Co-Producer:
1959  Odds Against Tomorrow

Executive Producer:
1959  Odds Against Tomorrow
1995  The Affair

Music:
1959  Odds Against Tomorrow
1995  The Affair
2005  Pictoplasma: Characters in Motion, Vol. 1

Original Music Composer:
1959  Odds Against Tomorrow
1984  Beat Street
1995  The Affair
2005  Pictoplasma: Characters in Motion, Vol. 1

Producer:
1959  Odds Against Tomorrow
1959  The World, the Flesh and the Devil
1970  The Angel Levine
1972  Buck and the Preacher
1984  Beat Street
1995  The Affair
2005  Pictoplasma: Characters in Motion, Vol. 1
????  King Leopold’s Ghost

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TV Performances

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About the Movie Section

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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

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Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.