00:00There were no representatives of myself in Hollywood for me to ask questions or
00:06mentor me or it's called you're on your own kid. Get out there and fight the battle.
00:12Every time I ever saw you and it just always surprised me of how good the show
00:17was and how balanced and how excited the audience got because they saw something
00:23real good that night. She broke down doors for our generation. She always
00:28taught me if they won't let you in the front door there's a way around and it's
00:32your job to find it. Get up, stop complaining, stop crying, go shopping if
00:36necessary. She has always remembered who she was as an African-American woman.
00:43Diane, Carolyn and a number of us have the responsibility of determining and committing
00:49ourselves to how we would be exploited by the Hollywood and the show
00:58business industry and certainly in the forefront of those elections was Diane
01:02Carroll. I won't call it racism I will call it innocence so many people knew
01:07nothing about black people at all. They didn't even sit with them here in
01:11California on a train or a bus. Everyone got into their non-integrated lifestyles and
01:19lived them and then they went to work. So all of a sudden I appeared at 20th Century Fox, NBC,
01:26NBC and it was ah what do we do with her.
01:29It only takes a half a day to be a thousand miles away away, it only takes a half a day to be a thousand
01:37miles away away. If there is a criteria for a legend I mean she probably meets every
01:54criteria there is and some. To have that foundation of the theater experience when
02:01you finally do television or do films you really know what you're doing. It becomes a real performance,
02:08you know something that's remembered, it's not forgotten.
02:12Why are you apologizing for his rudeness? Didn't even want to come and I insisted and then she wanted to go home.
02:18Here was a woman who was on the rise in her film career who decided to walk into this new industrial monster called television.
02:28I had never seen Julia on camera or on film before but I was quite young so the image of what I thought was correct, I mean who else were they going to turn to?
02:41No, never. Not land with daddy? No dear. Mrs. Wagadorn takes us with Mr. Wagadorn.
02:50She took her role as a role model very seriously. When she was doing Julia she had a black psychologist on the payroll to make sure that every script was appropriate and accurate and respectful. She has never accepted a role that she considered demeaning.
03:08I guess I didn't love my children, right? Because I wanted them to live.
03:11Yeah. So you told us to be afraid, right?
03:13You better be afraid. You better be afraid. That world out there will kill you.
03:18And what makes Diane so enormously attractive is not just that remarkable beauty she possesses biologically, but to listen to her mind is to see her become fiery.
03:31Retract this or I'll cram it down your throat.
03:38And at the same time the capacity can be terribly feminine and yielding when the appropriate moments makes those kind of demands. She is something to behold.
03:50You had a great feeling about the Four Clovers. Great feeling about the Esquives. And when they made it big, what happened?
04:01What happened? They left you. They left us.
04:06Oh, she's absolutely gorgeous. She's haunting actually when you see her, you know. She just sings beautiful and performs so well that you just get hypnotized by her performance.
04:20The quintessential Hollywood movie star. She was it for us. She was it.
04:27She's got this sort of warrior woman spirit that makes you stand at attention. It's not pretty. It's real beauty, which is something that comes. It's a gift that's from the beyond almost.
04:42Diane is one of a kind. And I admire very much the way in which she handled her life. The way in which she handled all the challenges that have been thrown at her.
04:56Whenever she hits the water, she comes in well above the waves.
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