Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-time period contract by a significant Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night time at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Heart in New York. She was ninety two and lived in Manhattan.

Ms. Horne might need become a serious film star, however she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the Forties due to the colour of her skin, though she was so light-skinned that, when she was a toddler, different black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after one other – “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Ladies and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) – to sing a track or two that might easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, the place the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient function in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever stated a phrase to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a bit of segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a film in regards to the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne mentioned in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat as a result of she has married a white man.

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the identical year.

Looking back on the age of 80, Ms. Horne stated: “My id may be very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I now not must be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be an emblem to anybody; I don’t should be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white lady that Hollywood form of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”