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Name: Butterfly McQueen
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Date of Birth:
January 07, 1911
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Place of Birth:
Tampa, Florida, USA
Mini-bio:
Born in Tampa, where her father worked as a stevedore and her mother as a maid, Thelma McQueen determined early in life to become a dancer. By age 13 she was living in Harlem performing with a dance t... read moreroupe and theater company. While appearing in a 1935 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, she danced in the Butterfly Ballet, earning her professional name of Butterfly McQueen in the process (she hated the name Thelma and later had her new moniker legalized). Her first Broadway appearance in the 1937 George Abbott production Brown Sugar led to an even better assignment in the long-running stage comedy What a Life! This in turn led to her discovery by film producer David O. Selznick, who cast McQueen as the simple-minded slave Prissy ("I don't know nuthin' 'bout birthin' no babies!") in his super-production Gone With the Wind (1939). Though the role earned her worldwide fame, it also typecast her as screechy-voiced, hysterical domestics. Even so, she delivered memorable performances in such '40s productions as Cabin in the Sky (1943), Mildred Pierce (1945), and Selznick's Duel in the Sun (1946). Her inability to get along with most of her co-stars, coupled with her unhappiness over the film roles assigned her, prompted the actress to quit the movies in 1947. The ensuing two decades were not easy ones for McQueen; she was obliged to accept a dizzying series of clerical and domestic jobs, occasionally resurfacing in short-running stage productions and briefly co-starring as Oriole on TV's Beulah series. At one point, she served as hostess at the Stone Mountain Civil War Memorial Museum in Atlanta, GA. She returned to Broadway in 1964, and four years later scored a personal success with a tailor-made role in the off-Broadway musical spoof Curley McDimple. She came back to films in 1974 while pursuing a Political Science degree at New York's City College. In 1980, she won an Emmy for her performance in the TV special The Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid, and in 1986 made her final screen appearance (looking and sounding pretty much as she did back in 1939!) in Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast. Butterfly McQueen was 85 when she died of burns sustained in a fire caused by a faulty kerosene heater. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Butterfly McQueen mini-bio: She was born Thelma McQueen and trained as a dancer.
She took her stage name from the "Butterfly Dance" after performing it
in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
McQueen made her first film in 1939 in what would become her most
identifiable role-as Prissy, the young maid in Gone with the Wind.
She also played an uncredited bit part as a sales assistant in The
Women, filmed after Gone with the Wind but released before it. She
continued to play maids and small parts in various films including Since
You Went Away (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946).
She also played Butterfly, Mary Livingstone's maid in the Jack Benny
radio program, for a time during World War II. But by 1947 had grown
tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her
film career. By 1950 she had played another racially-stereotyped role
for two years on the television series Beulah, which reunited her with
her Gone with the Wind co-star Hattie McDaniel. Her acting roles after
this were very few, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including
study, and received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1975.
She had one more role of some substance in the 1986 film The Mosquito
Coast. McQueen lived in Aiken, South Carolina and died in Augusta,
Georgia as a result of burns received when a kerosene heater she was
attempting to light exploded and burst into flames.
