Madame Sul-Te-Wan

“We never did discover the origin of her name. No one was bold enough to ask.” —Lillian Gish

There are a lot of Hollywood figures it’s hard to remember seeing. Half their roles are uncredited. Most of the remaining ones are only on screen for a matter of minutes. Their characters do not reliably have names. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this, at least in the days when fewer roles were credited. The industry runs on roles like that, simply because there are so many more minor parts than major ones. The problem is how few opportunities there were for people like Madame Sul-Te-Wan to have any other kind of Hollywood career.

In her obituary, Jet claimed her father to have been “a Hindu manservant.” The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance says there were rumours that her father had been a Native Hawaiian. Nothing so exotic. Nellie Crawford was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to former slaves Silas Crawford and Cleon De Londa. Her father abandoned the family, and to support them, her mother took in laundry from actors. Nellie became an actress herself, initially joining a company called Three Black Cloaks. She billed herself as Creole Nell. She toured with many theatrical companies, including some she founded herself.

In 1915, she appeared in Birth of a Nation, her feature debut. (She was in a short, “The Cause of It All,” that same year. She was credited in that one, but it only had six characters.) She primarily played maids, and her characters were primarily uncredited, for years to come. She is Church Member (uncredited) in King Vidor’s Hallelujah and Kali Sana—Aunt’s Cook (uncredited) in Erich Von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly. Starting in Heaven on Earth in 1931, in which it actually was credited, she began to appear as Madame Sul-Te-Wan, or variants thereof.

Frankly, the roles didn’t much get better, and she was seldom credited. Even in Carmen Jones, she’s uncredited as Carmen’s grandmother. Her appearance there ended up sparking a rumour that she was Dorothy Dandridge’s actual grandmother, which wasn’t true. She herself said the roles didn’t pay enough to buy a handkerchief, though she was the first black person known to have been under contract to a studio. I can’t imagine the roles took more than a couple of days, for the most part; how long can it take to play Native (uncredited) in King Kong or Black Cook (uncredited) in Imitation of Life?

That said, my goodness but she appeared with a lot of impressive people. Dandridge, of course, and the rest of that cast. She was in a Jack Benny movie, though I haven’t seen it and don’t know the role. She was in movies with everyone from Lucille Ball to Yul Brynner, from Shirley Temple to Spencer Tracy. Oh, the roles were small enough that I don’t know who of them she shared scenes with. What I do know is that she played Tituba in a movie adaptation of the Salem Witch Trials starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, and boy do I have to seek that out now.