A Star Has Died: Carmen de Lavallade (1931-2025)

 To my surprise, there’s been no mention of the passing of dancer Carmen de Lavallade in my hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times. Carmen died, in the waning days of 2025, in a New Jersey hospital, and east coast news outlets paid her glowing tributes. But I’m still shocked that her death, at age 94, was apparently ignored in L.A. After all, Carmen was born in Los Angeles, and—as a teenager—began her serious dance training after winning a scholarship to Lester Horton’s landmark Dance Theater in West Hollywood. Quickly becoming a star of the Horton troupe, she took on such fiercely dramatic roles as Salomé, while also teaching small kids like me the basics of modern dance.

                                                     Me at age 4, with my beloved teacher  

 Still in her early twenties, Carmen set out for the Big Apple, along with her close friend, future choreographer Alvin Ailey. Both soon found work in a 1954 Broadway production of House of Flowers, a fanciful Haiti-set musical that was an unlikely collaboration between Truman Capote and Harold Arlen. It was there that Carmen met and married Trinidad-born Geoffrey Holder, who later triumphed on Broadway with The Wiz: he would win Tonys both for directing the show and for contributing its lively costume design.     

 Now based in New York, Carmen continued on as a dancer, featured in Ailey’s American Dance Theater productions and guesting with other companies. Eventually she began teaching stage movement at the celebrated Yale School of Drama, where a young Meryl Streep was one of her students. When Carmen and I met for lunch in New York ten years ago (see photo above from that memorable afternoon) she reminisced about appearing in the premiere production of Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, imaginatively staged in the Yale swimming pool.

 Blessed with a beautiful face and a long slim body, Carmen was undeniably well-suited to movies too. This began back in her Lester Horton days, when she was cast in the 1954 screen adaptation of Carmen Jones, the Broadway hit that adapted Bizet’s Carmen to an African-American cast. If  you watch one of the big musical numbers, set in a local bar during World War II,  you’ll see a young Carmen, her long pony-tail swinging as she dances exuberantly to “Beat Out the Rhythm of the Drum.”  In 1959, she revealed her acting chops in a tense scene from a crime drama, Odds Against Tomorrow, wherein she played the tough-minded girlfriend of star Harry Belafonte. Almost forty years later, she was featured in John Sayles’ Texas drama, Lone Star.

 In the course of a long career, Carmen received many accolades, including a Kennedy Center honor in 2017. But I can’t help remembering a story my parents told me when I was a kid. In the 1950s, Carmem was appearing with two male dancers as an opening act for Pearl Bailey at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and my folks drove from L.A. to see her perform. Carmen’s name blazed forth on the marquee, and she danced nightly in an opulent show room for appreciative crowds. But Carmen was not allowed to lodge at the Flamingo. Her café au lait coloring meant she was stuck all day in a stuffy motel room, without access to the swimming pool and other amenities that made the Flamingo a world-class resort. So my parents gave up fun in the sun to spend their weekend keeping her company. When they got home, they told me all about it. It made no sense to me then . . .  and it still doesn’t. But I learned once more that the world outside of Lester Horton’s Dance Theater was not always a graceful place.

 

The Beautiful (and Ageless) Carmen de Lavallade

When I was four years old, long before I knew anything about movie stars, my idol was my first dance teacher. It was only natural. Carmen de Lavallade was tall, slim, and a beautiful café au lait color. She had a sweet smile and a gentle soul. And she moved like a dream.

I wasn’t her only admirer, needless to say. At Lester Horton’s Dance Theater, a bravely multicultural venue on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, she was a star. And stardom of course meant eventually heading for the bright lights of New York City. In 1954 she left her native Los Angeles, along with future choreographer Alvin Ailey. Soon the two were dancing on Broadway in the premiere of a fabled Harold Arlen-Truman Capote musical, House of Flowers. That’s where she met dancer-actor-director-choreographer-designer Geoffrey Holder, still remembered by many as the Uncola Man. They were married in a vibrant Caribbean ceremony much documented in the black press of the era. And they remained married until Holder’s passing last October, at the age of 84.

Through the years, my family kept in touch with Carmen. We greeted her backstage after L.A. performances. My parents saw her dance in Las Vegas, and later we watched for her in movies. (Among her screen roles is a small but vivid part in John Sayles’ Lone Star.) When I wrote articles about Lester Horton, I knew I could phone her for a few heartfelt quotes. After I published in the Los Angeles Times a piece about how Dance Theater had taught a small girl to be colorblind, she called to express her thanks.  

 But I could never have imagined the experience I’ve just had: sitting down with Carmen in a New York café for a few hours of comfortable girl-talk. I’m happy to say that she’s still elegantly beautiful, and still deeply involved in things artistic. No, she doesn’t exactly dance these days: at age 84, “I don’t call it dance, I call it movement.” But she’s just launched a one-woman show chronicling the three phases of her career. There were the L.A. years, of course, as well as the time she’s spent in New York, and also an unforgettable ten-year period when she taught stage movement at Yale Repertory Theatre, under the legendary Robert Brustein. Her students in that era were such future stars as Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. While at Yale, she learned to augment her dance training with a thorough understanding of the actor’s craft.

Since then she’s had modest but significant stage roles. She played the Mexican flower-seller in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire that (alas) raised some hackles because it cast black actors in the central roles. We chatted frankly about skin color: curiously, as a light- skinned African- American, she often finds herself chosen for Hispanic roles. Not long ago, she played a foul-mouthed Puerto Rican abuela: I was thoroughly tickled when she demonstrated this very flamboyant, and un-Carmen-like, voice.

We also talked more personally, about the pain of Geoffrey Holder’s last days. He was a man who reveled in color. While wasting away, in the aftermath of a broken femur, he was still able to do paintings of brilliant hue. I was moved to learn that at the service held in his memory, somber shades were banished. Mourners attended wearing all the colors of the rainbow.

It must be tragically hard to lose your husband of almost sixty years. At Dance Theater, I remember an expression: “Make a fall into a dance.” Carmen, I think, has done so – and done it beautifully. 

Here’s a small sample of Carmen’s enduring performance skills. She can also be seen dancing (or moving) to Stephen Sondheim’s “Children and Art” on a recent app called Dances for an iPhone. I’m also posting a recent snapshot, as well as a photo of myself at age 4 as Carmen’s student. Yes, that’s me, jumping into a hoop as she watches.

Geoffrey Holder: Un-Ordinary, Unforgettable

Geoffrey Holder, at age 84, has left the building. I wonder how many movie fans are saddened by that news. Holder is perhaps not a household name, despite his memorable appearances as the eerie Baron Samedi in To Live and Let Die and as the amiable Punjab in Annie. Ironically, he was best known for a series of commercials for 7-Up, in which, clad in a gleaming white suit, he sang the praises of “the Uncola.”

Even if you didn’t know the name, Geoffrey Holder made an impression. Measuring down from the top of his bald heat, he was six foot six, with a dancer’s grace and an exuberance all his own. His voice was basso profundo, his Caribbean inflection was lilting, and he spoke in superlatives: the world for him was “lovely,” “mahvelous.” And his clothes . . . suffice it to say that one of his many talents was for costume design.

I’ve  been following Geoffrey Holder’s career for many years, ever since my beloved first dance teacher, the beautiful Carmen De Lavallade, brought him down the aisle of the Lester Horton Dance Theater  and introduced him as the man she was going to marry. If memory serves, all of us little girls at Dance Theater were invited to the wedding, even though it was quite clear that we were not about to travel from L.A. to the fabulous estate in Connecticut where the outdoor nuptials were held. But we saw the photo spread (I think it was in Ebony, or Jet), and it looked to be a splendid calypso-flavored bash.

Carmen had met Geoffrey on Broadway, when both appeared in a Harold Arlen/Truman Capote  musical fable called House of Flowers. Playing the God of Life and Death, Geoffrey designed his own costume: a burnt-orange cape and a loin cloth. He intuitively knew how effective this get-up would be: “Being a dancer you stand with a straight spine. You look 12 feet tall.” In later years, Geoffrey returned to Broadway with The Wiz, the “urban” musical based on The Wizard of Oz. As director and choreographer he won two Tonys, and I well remember him dancing up to claim his statuette, artfully working the Uncola into his acceptance speech.

I’ve interviewed Geoffrey twice over the years, once for a piece on costume design, and once regarding his role as an unlikely tribal chieftain, Willie Shakespeare X, in the elephantine movie musical, Doctor Dolittle. He mostly enjoyed this first of many Hollywood adventures, but was blunt in discussing the egotistical and  racist Rex Harrison, as well as his equally obnoxious wife, actress Rachel Roberts. Typically, Geoffrey found a creative way to upstage Harrison in their first scene together. Noting Harrison’s veddy British vocal timbre, he decided, “I will drop my voice to make him sound like a sissy.” Gleefully he told me, “I had a private ball doing that.”

After describing to me the Paris soiree at which he met Marlene Dietrich, Geoffrey announced, “I am deliberately dropping names. I am so rich by being so honored by the best people. So when people talk about stars today – please!” He loved fun, but also held tightly to his formidable sense of self. As he liked to put it, “Dignity is not something you buy at Bloomingdale’s.”

A 2005 documentary film called Carmen & Geoffrey chronicles the long creative partnership of my former teacher and this amazing man. When I mentioned to Geoffrey that his wife was a truly lovely person, he promptly replied, “I know. I have good taste.”

Au revoir, Geoffrey. You’ve earned an “absolutely mahvelous” rest.

A quick segue from Geoffrey Holder’s flamboyant costumes to a heartfelt documentary about the subtle craft of Italian-born tailors. Vicki Vasilopoulos’ Men of the Cloth will be playing at the La Femme Film Festival for women directors in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday October 19th at 2 PM.  Brava, Vicki!