Early Life and Acting Career
Carol Douglas - aka Carolyn Strickland and Carolyn Cooke - was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. She is the daughter of Minnie Newsome, a jazz performer who has been cited as the inspiration for the Cab Calloway classic "Minnie the Moocher"; Douglas' father was a mortician. Sam Cooke was Douglas' cousin. At the age of 10 Douglas was a contestant and winner on the game show Name That Tune and says "Ebony followed my career for the next three years".
Douglas attended the Willard May School for professional children and afterwards the Quintanos High School for young professionals alongside Gregory Hines, Bernadette Peters, Carol Lynley and Patty Duke. While in high school Douglas sang in a female trio named April May & June who were signed as a management client by Little Anthony and the Imperials.
Douglas made a one-off recording in 1963 for RCA Victor cutting the single "I Don't Mind (Being Your Fool)" under the name Carolyn Cooke: becoming pregnant with her first son at age 15 ended RCA's interest in promoting her.
Douglas also cut several jingles for TV commercials - " used to do voiceovers for Ideal Toys and General Mills with Bernadette Peters" - but recalls: "I never thought I would be a singer", and for most of the 1960s Douglas pursued an acting career, appearing in an episode of her classmate's The Patty Duke Show but mostly acting in theatrical productions beginning with One Tuesday Morning starring Clarice Taylor. Later Douglas understudied Jonelle Allen in the off-Broadway production of The Life of Mary McCloud Bethune and co-starred with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson in the play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.
Carol Douglas married "high school sweetheart" Ken Douglas in the mid 1960s - resumed her musical career in the early 1970s touring nationally on the oldies circuit in a lineup of the Chantels featuring original frontwoman Arlene Smith: with these Chantels, Douglas cut the single "Some Tears Fall Dry" for Capitol.
Read more about this topic: Carol Douglas
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life, acting and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“...he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 6:48.
“As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It would be easy ... to regard the whole of world 3 as timeless, as Plato suggested of his world of Forms or Ideas.... I propose a different view—one which, I have found, is surprisingly fruitful. I regard world 3 as being essentially the product of the human mind.... More precisely, I regard the world 3 of problems, theories, and critical arguments as one of the results of the evolution of human language, and as acting back on this evolution.”
—Karl Popper (1902–1994)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)