Bill Robinson was an American dancer and an actor born in Richmond, Virginia, United States on 25. 05. 1878.
Background
Bill Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia, United States on 25. 05. 1878. to Maxwell Robinson, a machine-shop worker, and Maria Robinson, a choir singer. He is believed to have had a sister and an older brother. The details of his early life are known only through legend, much of it perpetuated by Robinson himself.
Career
At the age of six he was appearing as a "hoofer, " or song-and-dance man, in local beer gardens and, two years later, in Washington, D. C. While still a child, he toured with Mayme Remington's troupe as a "pick" as black child actors were then known. In 1891, at the age of twelve, he joined a traveling company in The South Before the War, and in 1905 he worked with George Cooper as a vaudeville team. Not until he was fifty did he dance for white audiences, having devoted his early career exclusively to appearances on the black theater circuit. In 1908 in Chicago he met Marty Forkins, who became his lifelong manager. Under Forkins' tutelage Robinson matured, moderated his penchant for gambling, and began working as a solo act in nightclubs, increasing his earnings to an estimated $3, 500 per week. The publicity that gradually came to surround him included the creation of his famous "stair dance, " his successful gambling exploits, his prodigious charity, his ability to run backward at great speed and to consume ice cream by the quart, his argot most notably the neologism "copasetic" and such stunts as dancing down Broadway in 1939 from Columbus Circle to 44th Street in celebration of his sixty-first birthday. Toward the end of the vaudeville era a white impresario, Lew Leslie, produced Blackbirds of 1928, a black revue for white audiences featuring Robinson and other black stars. From then on his public role was that of a dapper, smiling, plaid-suited ambassador to the white world, maintaining a tenuous connection with black show-business circles through his continuing patronage of the Hoofers' Club, an entertainers' haven in Harlem. Consequently, blacks and whites developed differing opinions of him. To whites, for example, his nickname "Bojangles" meant happy-go-lucky, while the black variety artist Tom Fletcher claimed it was slang for "squabbler. " Political figures and celebrities appointed him an honorary mayor of Harlem, a lifetime member of policemen's associations and fraternal orders, and a mascot of the New York Giants baseball team. Robinson reciprocated with openhanded generosity and frequently credited the white dancer James Barton for his contribution to Robinson's dancing style. After 1930 black revues waned in popularity, but Robinson remained in vogue with white audiences for more than a decade in motion pictures produced by such companies as RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Paramount. Most of them had musical settings, in which he played old-fashioned roles in nostalgic romances. His most frequent role was that of an antebellum butler opposite Shirley Temple or Will Rogers in such films as The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel, and In Old Kentucky (all released in 1935). Rarely did he depart from the stereotype imposed by Hollywood writers. In a small vignette in Hooray for Love (1935) he played a mayor of Harlem modeled on his own ceremonial honors; in One Mile from Heaven (1937) he played a policeman; and in the war-time musical Stormy Weather (1943) he played a romantic lead opposite the singer Lena Horne after Hollywood had relaxed its taboo against such roles for blacks. Audiences enjoyed his style, which eschewed the frenetic manner of the jitterbug. In contrast, Robinson always remained cool and reserved, rarely using his upper body and depending on his busy, inventive feet and his expressive face. He appeared in one film for black audiences, Harlem Is Heaven (1931), a financial failure that turned him away from independent production. In 1939 he returned to the stage in The Hot Mikado, a jazz version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta produced at the New York World's Fair. His next appearance, in All in Fun (1940), failed to attract audiences. His last theatrical project was to have been Two Gentlemen from the South with James Barton, in which black and white roles reverse and eventually come together as equals, but the show did not open.
Achievements
Membership
A lifetime member of policemen's associations and fraternal orders.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"To his own people, " wrote Marshall and Jean Stearns, "Robinson became a modern John Henry, who instead of driving steel, laid down iron taps" (Stearns and Stearns, p. 184).
Connections
Little is known of his first marriage, to Fannie S. Clay in Chicago, Illinois, United Stares shortly after World War I, his divorce in 1943, or his marriage to Elaine Plaines on January 27, 1944, in Columbus, Ohio, United States.