Jane White Passes Away at 88

The New York Times reports today that on July 24, actress Jane White passed away due to cancer. She was 88 years old. 

White, who made her Broadway debut in 1945's Strange Fruit, had her first large role as Queen Aggravain in Once Upon a Mattress. 

Despite feeling the effects of discrimination - "I've just always been too ‘white' to be ‘black' and too ‘black' to be ‘white,' which, you know, gets to you after a while, particularly when the roles keep passing you by," she said in a 1968 interview - she went on to have success in both film and stage roles.

White won the 1988-89 Los Angeles Critics Circle Award for her role as the Mother in Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding. White also took on roles in such dramas as Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis and Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts; comedies such as Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet; and musicals such as Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and the 2001 Broadway production of Follies.

In addition to the productions of Once Upon a Mattress, her television work included a 1979 stint on the soap operas The Edge of Night, A World Apart, and Search for Tomorrow. She was one of the first African-American actresses to play a role under contract on soap operas when she originated the role of Lyndia Holliday, R. N. on The Edge of Night. In 1998 she played the schoolteacher Lady Jones in the movie version of Toni Morrison's Beloved.