Carmen Jones

…an extravagant circus musical; and Carmen Jones (1943), the musical comedy version of the opera Carmen, with an all-black cast. Rose owned several nightclubs, and his varied career also included astute real estate and stock market investments, art collecting, and highly publicized philanthropy. One of his several marriages was to…

…appeared in the Broadway musical Carmen Jones, performing “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” and he later played with the Benny Goodman Quintet in Seven Lively Arts (1945), another musical. From 1949 to 1953 he toured with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, and in the late 1950s he was a…

…role in Otto Preminger’s all-black Carmen Jones (1954), earning an Oscar nomination. (She did not sing in Carmen Jones, however; the singing was dubbed by mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne.) Because she was a black woman in a racially tense era, film offers thereafter did not come readily, though she did appear…