Diana Sands

Cancer, man. It’s so frustrating when you discover that someone with an enormously promising career died before forty. She kept working as long as she could, which is a hell of a thing, and the last thing she did in the movie industry was get a childhood friend cast in the role she herself was no longer physically able to take. It’s a lot to process. It’s the standard difficulty in being the token Magpies Angel of Death; it’s one thing when I’m writing up someone who dies in their eighties and another when I’m writing up someone who died before they even hit middle age.

Diana Sands was born in the Bronx. She attended high school at what was at the time the Music & Art High School. Her classmates included Diahann Carroll and Billy Dee Williams; she started appearing in plays there, because of course she did. It’s the whole point of the school. She started her professional career as a dancer with a traveling carnival—no one promises you great jobs right away, even if you graduate from that school—but six years after graduation, she was cast in the role that she would remain identified with.

Beneatha Younger lives with her mother, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew in the South Side of Chicago. Her mother has inherited $10,000 in insurance after her father’s death, and her mother buys the family a house in a white neighbourhood. Beneatha is an aspiring doctor who’s being courted by an upper class black American and by a visiting Yoruba student from Nigeria and has to decide if she wants to pursue assimilation or connect with her African roots. She is, as with most of the characters in play, complicated and nuanced.

1961 was a strange year for the Oscars. In theory, had Sands been nominated for an Oscar, she would have been in competition with Rita Moreno, assuming she didn’t take Moreno’s slot. Raisin in the Sun was nominated for no Oscars at all, but West Side Story was up for eleven Oscars, losing only Adapted Screenplay. That, in turn, was won by Judgment at Nuremberg, itself nominated for eleven as well, winning only two. (Most of the failure to overlap was because there were still separate categories for colour and B&W.) Other major nominees included Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Children’s Hour, and The Hustler.

Would Sands have won an Oscar had she lived? Let’s be real; the odds are against it. But she might have won a Tony; she was nominated for one for the original play of The Owl and the Pussycat, opposite Alan Alda. Or maybe an Emmy; she did some TV work, too. Or maybe she just would’ve continued to do solid work without getting awards for it; goodness knows that happens to a lot of people regardless of other factors. But we’ll never know, and that’s sad.