Hope Clarke

Hope Clarke, born March 23, 1941, in Washington, D.C., is an American actress, dancer, vocalist, choreographer, and director whose career spans Broadway, opera, film, and television. The daughter of Maurice Aloysius Clarke and Hope Aldridge, she grew up alongside her sister Barbara in a middle-class Black community in Washington. Clarke began her formal dance training at the Alma Davis Dance School, where she studied alongside her sister. She attended Spingarn High School, graduating in 1959, and during her senior year danced as a lead performer with Doris W. Jones and her company. She also worked as a summer employee for the CIA during this period.

Clarke launched her professional career as a principal dancer with both the Katherine Dunham Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, touring internationally with the Ailey company to critical and audience acclaim. Beyond those two companies, she also performed with the companies of Tally Beatty, George Faison, and Louis Johnson. Her stage career began in earnest in 1959 when, at her sister's urging, she auditioned for and won a role in the original touring cast of West Side Story, joining the company in Chicago and remaining with it through April 23, 1960. In 1961, she appeared on Broadway in Kwamina, an interracial love story starring Brock Peters and Robert Guillaume, with choreography by Agnes de Mille. In 1966, she appeared in the Metropolitan Opera's first production, Antony and Cleopatra. The following year, she was part of the ensemble in Hallelujah, Baby!, a production that received five Tony Awards including Best Musical. In 1968, she played Mamselle Tulip in House of Flowers at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, and in 1969 she appeared in Douglas Turner Ward's The Reckoning at the St. Mark's Playhouse, a venue associated with the Negro Ensemble Company.

Clarke's Broadway work continued into the 1970s. In 1970, she danced in Purlie, a musical nominated for five Tony Awards. In 1972, she appeared in Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, the first Broadway musical directed by an African American woman, Vinnette Carroll. In 1985, Clarke played the role of Ruby in the musical Grind, working alongside choreographer Lester Wilson. Her Broadway performing career extended from 1960 to 1985.

Alongside her stage work, Clarke built a substantial screen career. She relocated to Hollywood with the assistance of actor Raymond St. Jacques, and went on to co-star with Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action (1977), appear alongside St. Jacques and Philip Michael Thomas in A Book of Numbers, and portray Matilde, the mother of Jean-Michel Basquiat, in Basquiat (1996). She appeared in the 1978 television miniseries King, based on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Her television guest appearances include Hill Street Blues, The Jeffersons, Three's Company, The Ropers, Hart to Hart, Amen, Another World, As the World Turns, Beat Street, Into the Night, and Sex and the City.

A pivotal chapter in Clarke's career began in 1986 when Broadway director and producer George C. Wolfe hired her to create movement and staging for The Colored Museum, initiating a long-term collaboration. Together, Wolfe and Clarke worked on ten plays and musicals, among them the opera Amistad, the Off-Broadway production Spunk, and the Broadway shows Jelly's Last Jam, Caroline, or Change, and A Free Man of Color. Her choreography for Jelly's Last Jam, which developed from New York workshops and a production at the Mark Taper Forum before reaching Broadway, earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Choreography in 1992 as well as a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Choreography that same year. She also choreographed Caroline, or Change, which began Off-Broadway before transferring to Broadway in 2004 for 126 performances, received six Tony Award nominations, and ran for two months at the Lyttleton Theatre at the National Theatre in London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical. That production earned Clarke the 2004 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreographer. In 2010, she choreographed A Free Man of Color for Broadway.

In 1995, Clarke made history by becoming the first African American, and the first African American woman, to direct and choreograph a major professional U.S. staging of Porgy and Bess, producing the Houston Grand Opera production, a two-million-dollar undertaking that toured across the United States and traveled to Italy and Japan. In 2012, she directed a production of Porgy and Bess at Morgan State University's Murphy Fine Arts Center. Also in 1995, she choreographed The Tempest, and in 1997 she adapted and directed Nobody Says Baby Like A Black Man, a dramatic collage of African American love poems, at the American Place Theater in New York.

Clarke co-founded the 5 Plus Ensemble, also known as New Beginnings Theater, alongside Michael Blake, Carmen de Lavallade, Sheila Rohan, and others. The company was created to showcase the work of dancers, choreographers, and musicians over the age of fifty. In 2017, she choreographed Fly, a play about the Tuskegee Airmen produced by the Lincoln Center Institute, which toured to venues including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Pasadena Playhouse, Florida Studio Theatre, St. Louis Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse, Ford's Theatre, Vineyard Playhouse, and Crossroads Theatre. In 2025, she choreographed Blues in the Night for the Arizona Theatre Company.

Among her additional honors, Clarke served on the Tony Awards Nominating Committee during the 2009–2012 and 2015–2018 Broadway seasons, and in 2020 was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. In 2018, she received recognition at the 3rd Annual Project1VOICE Honors for her contributions to American culture. Clarke was originally from Washington, District of Columbia.