Dorothy Dandridge has a truly remarkable career. In the 1950s, she was the performer who paved the way for the following generations of black actresses across the globe.

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Dandridge started her life off as a nightclub singer and actress who sang in supper clubs in the 1930s and ’40s. She eventually began receiving proposals to appear in small and uncredited roles in movies, all while defying the biases of sexual liberalism and social conservatism.

© Pillow to Post (1945) / Warner Bros.

But her personal life wasn’t that happy and glorious: her daughter Lynn was injured at birth and she continuously blamed herself for such her horrible mental condition.

Due to oxygen deprivation during birth, the baby girl’s brain was irreversible. Lynn wasn’t developing normally: she couldn’t talk, learn, or even recognize her own mother.

Such a tragedy led Dorothy Dandridge to clinical depression. She was so deeply shattered that couldn’t even leave her home whatsoever. That’s why the actress’s relatives decided to take after the kid for money.

When Lynn became seven years old, she was difficult to control. Dandridge was desperate: her marriage was a failure, her only daughter was untreatable, and all here dreams were fallen apart.

At first, the Hollywood actress refused to place her baby girl in a mental health facility. For 13 years, a kind-hearted woman named Helen Calhoun took care of the ill child, but when Dorothy’s finances were in ruins, she was forced to put Lynn to a state institution, having surrendered her parental rights.

Dorothy Dandridge coped with her failed life and depression with alcohol and medication, falling into a deep hole. Her daughter Lynn died in 2003 around 60 years old.