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Pearl Mae Bailey (1918 – 1990)
Newport News
Jazz
Pearl Bailey was a gifted artist and humanitarian,
whose performing career spanned all mediums. She began as
a singer and dancer in her father’s Pentecostal church
at the age of three. A childhood ambition to teach was side-railed
in 1933, when she won an amateur contest at Philadelphia’s
Pearl Theater.
Bailey quickly dropped out of school to join
the vaudeville and nightclub circuits of Pennsylvania and
Washington DC. She began to work with Big-Band orchestras
in the early 1940s, and toured with the USO from 1941 until
the year of her death.
Her acting career began in 1946, when she
starred in the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman, a role
that netted her an award for best Broadway newcomer. The
following year the first of her films, Variety Girl, was
released. A television career beginning in the 1950s led
to her own ABC series, The Pearl Bailey Show, in 1970-71.
Bailey also authored six books.
Bailey was honored by the Screen Actors Guild
in 1978 for “outstanding achievement in fostering the
finest ideals of the acting profession,” and by the
Women’s International Center in 1989 for her active
support of human rights around the world.
Other awards and honors include a Tony Award
for her title role in the all-black cast of Hello Dolly
in 1967; a 1970 appointment as America’s “Ambassador
of Love” by President Richard Nixon; and the Medal
of Freedom, presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Bailey served as Goodwill Ambassador to the
United Nations under the administrations of Presidents Ford,
Reagan and George Bush.
Pearl Bailey returned to school in 1978,
and received a bachelor’s degree in theology from Georgetown
University at the age of sixty-seven, as well as an honorary
doctorate degree from the school.
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