Donyale Luna Would Be 80

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of Donyale Luna (Peggy Ann Freeman, 1945-1979). Luna is widely celebrated as the first black supermodel, but she was an actress as well, which is more our bailiwick here. What’s more, her entire life was a kind of performance. She was funny and relished being strange and indecipherable and enigmatic.

Luna came from Detroit. By the time she was a teenager, she had already devised her pseudonym and had begun speaking in an affected accent of her own devising. Precocious and artistic, she hung out at coffee houses and appeared in school plays. When she was 20 years old, her mother shot her father to death in an apparent response to his long-term abusiveness, but by that time Luna had escaped and reinvented herself completely.

6’2″ and strikingly beautiful, Luna was spotted on the street in 1963 by English photographer David McCabe, who encouraged her to move to New York and helped her get started there. Richard Avedon became an early patron. Her first professional gig (shot by Avedon) was a lay-out for Mademoiselle featuring Woody Allen. Months later he photographed her with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. She was the first black woman on the cover of Vogue (though just the British edition) and Harper’s Bazaar, though her true racial identity was de-emphasized on that one.

Luna wasn’t just a beauty; she was also an entertaining character, with that mysterious accent, her flair for style, and her own patented runway gait when modeling. It was natural that she would begin to go before motion picture cameras as well. She started with Andy Warhol movies in 1965 and 1966 (Camp and several screen tests). She was also in William Klein’sWho Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), Antonioni’sBlow Up (1966) and on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during that period. In 1968 she got to act opposite Groucho Marx, as God’s main squeeze in Skidoo, and she also got to perform in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (the photo with Brian Jones above is from that filming). The following year, Federico Fellini gave Luna her first named role in Satyricon (1969). As a frequent muse and collaborator of Salvador Dali’s, she was in the 1970 film Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali. The title role in Carmelo Bene’s psychedelic version of Salome (1972), was her biggest and last screen role. It is said that in 1973 she was shopping around an idea about a film based on her life. It is widely speculated that Berry Gordy’s 1975 Motown film Mahogany starring Diana Ross was a fictionalized take, inspired by her story.

By the mid ’70s, Luna had become less the “It” girl, largely because of her dependence on a wide variety of drugs. In 1975 Italian photographer Luigi Cazzaniga did a nude layout with her for Playboy. The pair got married and moved to Italy, where she became somewhat isolated from the business. In early 1977 she gave birth to a daughter, Dream Cazzaniga. In mid-1979, when the baby was still a toddler, Luna died of a heroin overdose. She was only 33.

Dream Cazzaniga later became a model herself. She co-produced and appears in the excellent 2023 HBO documentary Donyale Luna: Supermodel which was the ultimate inspiration for this post. I love the image they chose for the poster, which conveys both her humor and her sense of visual surrealism. It’s extremely weird that a woman with all of those credits got swallowed up by history — but there’s no time like the present for addressing the lapse!