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Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)

Alias:
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry

Birthplace:
Chicago, Illinois, USA

Born:
May 19, 1930

Died:
January 12, 1965

Biography from TheMovieDB

Lorraine Hansberry was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Her family challenged legal segregation, giving rise to the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. This might have inspired Hansberry to accomplish a first: The opening of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway on March 11, 1959, which was adapted to screenplay form for two feature films. No black female author had done the former before. The play's storyline about the Youngers, a black family trying out an integrationist vision of life in spite of societal racism, resonates with Hansberry's father's legal battle from a decade earlier. Although Hansberry had many writings published and wrote other plays, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window was her only other play that got a production during her life. In 1963, Hansberry received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, leading to her untimely death at the age of 34.

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Film Performances

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Film Production

Screenplay:
1961  A Raisin in the Sun

Theatre Play:
1961  A Raisin in the Sun
2008  A Raisin in the Sun

Writer:
1961  A Raisin in the Sun
1969  To Be Young, Gifted and Black: The World of Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words
1972  To Be Young, Gifted and Black
2008  A Raisin in the Sun
2019  National Theatre Live: Les Blancs

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TV Performances

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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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