Butterfly McQueen

Butterfly McQueen, born Thelma McQueen on January 8, 1911, in Tampa, Florida, was an American actress whose career spanned Broadway, film, television, and radio across five decades. Her father, Wallace McQueen, worked as a stevedore, and her mother, Mary McQueen, worked as a maid. Following her parents' separation, she was raised by her mother in Augusta, Georgia, where nuns at a convent provided her education. She had intended to pursue nursing until a high school teacher encouraged her to try acting. She trained initially with Janet Collins and danced with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. The nickname "Butterfly" — a reference to her constantly moving hands — came from her performance of the Butterfly Ballet in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and she eventually adopted it as her legal name.

McQueen began her performing career as a dancer, working with Katherine Dunham's dance troupe before making her professional stage debut in George Abbott's Brown Sugar. Her Broadway career extended from 1937 to 1987 and included appearances in Three Men on a Horse, Happy Birthday, Mr. Abbott!, the musical Swingin' The Dream, and What a Life, among other productions. It was during her appearance in What a Life in 1938 that talent scout Kay Brown, working on behalf of producer David O. Selznick, spotted her and recommended she audition for Gone with the Wind. After reviewing her screen test, Selznick cast her as Prissy, the role for which she became most widely recognized. The character's line — "Oh, Miss Scarlett! I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!" — became one of the most quoted in the film's history. McQueen was unable to attend the film's premiere, as it was held at a whites-only theater.

Despite the visibility the role brought her, McQueen found it demeaning to African Americans and grew increasingly frustrated with the typecasting that followed. She later reflected, "I didn't mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn't mind being funny, but I didn't like being stupid." Her subsequent film appearances included Cabin in the Sky (1943), an uncredited role in Mildred Pierce (1945), and a supporting part in Duel in the Sun (1946). She also had an uncredited bit part in The Women (1939). By 1947, having grown weary of the ethnic stereotypes she was repeatedly asked to portray, she stepped away from film work entirely. During World War II, she had also appeared frequently as a comedian on the Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast Jubilee, and in the 1940s she played the character Butterfly — Rochester's niece and Mary Livingstone's maid — on Jack Benny's radio program.

McQueen transitioned to television in the 1950s, appearing from 1950 to 1952 in the series Beulah, where she played Oriole, Beulah's friend. The early episodes of that run briefly reunited her with fellow Gone with the Wind cast member Hattie McDaniel, who withdrew from the series due to illness after the first six episodes. In 1964, McQueen starred alongside Marion Marlowe in the Off-Broadway production The Athenian Touch. In 1974, she was part of the original cast of the stage musical The Wiz when it debuted in Baltimore, Maryland, playing the Queen of the Field Mice — a character drawn from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — but her role was cut when the production was revised before its Broadway opening.

As acting opportunities diminished, McQueen pursued academic study and received a bachelor's degree in political science from City College of New York in 1975, at the age of 64. She returned to television in the late 1970s, playing Aunt Thelma, a fairy godmother, in the ABC Weekend Special episode "The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody" (1978) and the ABC Afterschool Special episode "Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid" (1979). Her performance in the latter earned her a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children's Programming in 1980. Her final feature film appearance was in The Mosquito Coast (1986), and her final screen role came in the television film Polly, a reimagining of the Pollyanna story featuring a Black cast.

In July 1983, a jury awarded McQueen $60,000 in a lawsuit she had filed against two bus-terminal security guards who had accused her of being a pickpocket and a vagrant at a Washington, D.C., Greyhound terminal in April 1979. McQueen was an outspoken atheist, and in 1989 the Freedom From Religion Foundation honored her with its Freethought Heroine Award. She donated her body to medical science and remembered the Foundation in her will. McQueen never married and had no children. She divided her time between New York in the summer and Augusta, Georgia, in the winter. She died on December 22, 1995, at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, at the age of 84, from burns sustained when a kerosene heater malfunctioned and caught fire.