Butterfly McQueen

Born January 8, 1911, in Tampa, Florida,[3][4] Thelma McQueen was the daughter of Wallace McQueen, a stevedore/dockworker, and Mary McQueen, who worked as a maid.[5] After her parents separated, Thelma lived with her mother in Augusta, Georgia, where she was educated by nuns at a convent. She had planned to become a nurse until a high-school teacher suggested that she try acting. McQueen initially studied with Janet Collins and danced with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. Around this time she acquired the nickname "Butterfly" – a tribute to her constantly moving hands – for her performance of the Butterfly Ballet in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Disliking her birth name, she later legally changed it to Butterfly McQueen. She performed with the dance troupe of Katherine Dunham before making her professional debut in George Abbott's Brown Sugar.[3]

McQueen was appearing as a student in the Broadway comedy What a Life in 1938 when she was spotted by Kay Brown, talent scout for David O. Selznick, then in pre-production for Gone With the Wind (eventually released in 1939). Brown recommended that McQueen audition for the film. After Selznick saw her screen test, he never considered anyone else and McQueen was cast in the role that would become her most identifiable – "Prissy", a simple-minded house maid.[6] She uttered the famous words: "Oh, Miss Scarlett! I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!" Her distinctive, high-pitched voice was described by a critic as "the itsy-little voice fading over the far horizon of comprehension".[7] While the role is well known to audiences, McQueen did not enjoy playing the part and felt it was demeaning to African-Americans.[5] She was unable to attend the film's premiere because it was held at a whites-only theater.[2]

She had an uncredited bit part as a sales assistant in The Women (1939), filmed after Gone with the Wind but released before it. She also played Butterfly, Rochester's niece and Mary Livingstone's maid, in Jack Benny's radio program in the 1940s. She appeared in an uncredited role in Mildred Pierce (1945) and played a supporting role in Duel in the Sun (1946). By 1947, she had grown tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her film career. During World War II, McQueen frequently appeared as a comedian on the Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast Jubilee. Many of these broadcasts are available on the Internet Archive.

From 1950 until 1952, she was featured (and briefly reunited with fellow Gone With the Wind actor Hattie McDaniel, who appeared in the first six episodes before withdrawing due to illness) in another racially stereotyped role on the television series Beulah, in which she played Beulah's friend Oriole, a character originated on radio by Ruby Dandridge, who took over the TV role from McQueen in 1952–53. In 1964 she starred alongside Marion Marlowe in the Off-Broadway commercial flop, The Athenian Touch. In a lighter moment, she appeared in a 1969 episode of The Dating Game.

McQueen was in the original version of the stage musical The Wiz when it debuted in Baltimore, Maryland in 1974. She played the Queen of the Field Mice, a character from the original L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, when the show was revised prior to going to Broadway, McQueen's role was cut by incoming director Geoffrey Holder.

Offers for acting roles began to dry up around this time, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including political study. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from City College of New York in 1975.[2] McQueen played the character of Aunt Thelma, a fairy godmother, in the ABC Weekend Special episode "The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody" (1978) and the ABC Afterschool Special episode "Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid" (1979); her performance in the latter earned her a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming.

Her final feature film role was in The Mosquito Coast (1986). Her final appearance was in the TV movie Polly, a reimagining of the Pollyanna story with a Black cast.[8]

McQueen neither married nor had children. She lived in New York in the summer months and in Augusta, Georgia, during the winter.[9]

A Democrat, she supported Adlai Stevenson's campaign during the 1952 presidential election.[10]

In 1975, aged 64, McQueen received a bachelor's degree in political science from City College of New York.[11]

In July 1983, a jury awarded McQueen $60,000 in a judgment stemming from a lawsuit she filed against two bus terminal security guards. McQueen sued for harassment after she claimed the security guards accused her of being a pickpocket and a vagrant while she was at a Washington, D.C. Greyhound bus terminal in April 1979.[12]

McQueen died at age 84 on December 22, 1995, at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, from burns sustained when a kerosene heater she attempted to light malfunctioned and burst into flames.[18] McQueen donated her body to medical science[2] and remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

• Bourne, Stephen (2008). Butterfly McQueen remembered. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 9780810860186.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Butterfly McQueen.

• Butterfly McQueen at the Internet Broadway Database
• Butterfly McQueen at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Butterfly McQueen at IMDb
• Butterfly McQueen at Find a Grave
• Hear Butterfly McQueen perform on a broadcast of Dinah Shore's radio show