His RCA album "Calypso" made him the first artist in industry history to sell over 1 million LP's. Since that launching, Belafonte has sustained an inordinately successful career:
He developed a relationship with the young architects of the art form, the geniuses of modern jazz, and on the occasion of his first professional appearance, he had Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Tommy Potter and Al Haig as his "back-up band". Paralleling this pursuit was his interest and love of jazz. With classmates like Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Rod Steiger and Tony Curtis - just to name a few - Belafonte became thoroughly immersed in the world of theatre. He joined the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research under the tutelage of the renowned German director, Erwin Piscator. The world that the theater opened up to him put Belafonte, for the first time, face to face with what would be his destiny - a life in the performing arts. After his tour of duty ended, he was honorably discharged and returned to New York City where he worked both in the garment center and as a janitor's assistant.įor doing repairs in an apartment (of Clarice Taylor and Maxwell Glanville), Belafonte was given, as his gratuity, a ticket to a production of HOME IS THE HUNTER at a community theater in Harlem - the American Negro Theatre (A.N.T.). Unable to finish high school, he enlisted in the United States Navy and served for almost two years as a munitions loader. He tried to adapt to his new environment, a process that came with great difficulty. The island and all its variety became his cultural reservoir.Īt the outbreak of World War II, his mother retrieved him from the island and brought him back to Harlem. Overwhelmed and intimidated by its ghetto streets and thinking the islands to be a safer place, his immigrant mother sent him back to the island of her birth, Jamaica. Harry Belafonte was born in Harlem in New York City in 1927.