Hilda Simms

Actress Hilda Simms in her dressing room applying makeup before a performance, 1949.

"Anna Lucasta" and Ms. Simms's performance in the title role created a stir when the play, written by Philip Yordan and produced by the American Negro Theater, moved from Harlem to Broadway in 1944. For the first time, American playgoers saw an all-black cast acting in a drama that did not deal with racial issues. Ms. Simms played a middle-class woman who falls into prostitution and tries to fight her way back to respectability.

Ms. Simms, whose original surname was Moses, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was one of nine children and studied teaching at the University of Minnesota until lack of money forced her to leave.

In 1943, Ms. Simms moved to New York. She acted in radio dramas and joined the American Negro Theater, where she was in charge of sound effects, props and publicity.

After appearing as a Southern ingenue in "Three's a Family," she was cast in "Anna Lucasta," a play written for white actors. Although most of the cast members were amateurs, the play received strong reviews and moved to Broadway. In 1947 Ms. Simms went with the play when it moved to London. While in Britain, she married the American actor Richard Angerolla. (Her first marriage, to William Simms in 1941, ended in divorce.)

Under the name Julie Riccardo, she also sang in Paris nightclubs before returning to the U.S. The couple returned to the states in the 1950s and Simms embarked on a brief film career. Her first role was as co-star to heavy-weight boxing champion Joe Louis. She played the boxer' wife in The Joe Louis Story (1953). Her only other movie role was that of the hatcheck girl in Black Widow (1954). Under the name Julie Riccardo, she also sang in Paris nightclubs before returning to the United States in 1953 to make the film "The Joe Louis Story." Her other film role was in "The Black Widow" (1954). She also appeared in "The Cool World" (1960), "Tambourines to Glory" (1963) and a revival of "The Madwoman of Chaillot" (1970) in New York theaters. On television, she was in the series "The Nurses."

Simms believed she was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s because of alleged communist affiliations. In an article titled "I'm No Benedict Arnold," which appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1960, Simms reported that the U.S. Defense Department notified her that the Department of Justice denied her passport in 1955 and canceled her scheduled 14-week USO tour of the Armed Forces in Europe. Simms, who had entertained troops and made War Bond tours during World War II, felt the Defense Department decision and perhaps dozens of other lost opportunities during that period came from speculation about her affiliation with the Communist Party in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Unable to continue her film career, Simms continued her stage career and obtained her own radio program known as Ladies Day on New York's WOV. She also became an active participant in political movements, serving as the creative arts director for the New York State Human Rights Commission where her commitment brought discrimination against black actors to the public attention and helped usher in better film roles for luminary African American actors of the era.

When she became director of the creative arts program of the New York State division of human rights in the 1960's, she focused attention on discrimination and the lack of roles for black actors in film and television. After earning a master's degree in education from City College, she worked for drug treatment programs in New York.

She died of pancreatic cancer on February 6, 1994, at the age of 75, at the home of her sister.

Sources: NY Times, 'Hilda Simms, Actress, Dies at 75; Broadway Star of 'Anna Lucasta' by William Grimes; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division