The Leslie Uggams Show

Today is Leslie Uggams’ 80th birthday and I hope you will forgive the joke I invariably think of when I see her name, which is “Would Wes-wee wike a wittoo ‘uggams?” If you’re done throwing up, we can proceed.

When I was a kid, on account of Roots (1977), I guess, I just assumed that Leslie Uggams (b.1943) was just another one of those prestige black actors, like Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield,Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and she was, she absolutely was that. She attended Julliard and won a Tony for her 1967 performance in Hallelujah, Baby. But her background was much show bizzier than the others. She was the daughter of a singer and a chorus girl at the Cotton Club.

Uggams started out as a child actress on shows like Beulah, and a contestant on shows like Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. She performed at the Apollo on a bill with Ella Fitzgerald, and she sang on the shows of Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller. She combined a terrific legit voice with the beauty and contemporary pop personality of Diana Ross.

It seems almost inevitable that in the wake of that 1968 Emmy, four hit records, and successful performances she’d given on The Ed Sullivan Show,The Hollywood Palace etc, she was given The Leslie Uggams Show in 1969. The show was a hastily conceived fill-in for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which had been cancelled. It’s often claimed that it was the second TV variety show with a black host (after Nat King Cole) but my research for my new book has uncovered a couple of others before Cole’s, including The Hazel Scott Show (1950) and Uptown Jubilee (1949), maybe others. Still, this was a much more high-profile experiment, and a bit of a grand gesture on the part of the network (NBC) in the face of the racial upheavals of the times. Her cast members included Johnny Brown and Dennis Allen, both from Laugh-In. Guests included Sly and the Family Stone, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Matthis, as well as David Frye,Jim Nabors, and the cast of Hogan’s Heroes. Sadly the show didn’t catch on, however. Only ten episodes were produced. But it surely helped pave the way for the hit Flip Wilson Show, which premiered the following year, and George Kirby’s first special the same year.

On top of Roots, Uggams’ theatrical films include Skyjacked! (1972), Black Girl (1972), Sugar Hill (1993) and the Deadpool movies (2016-2024) as well as recurring roles on shows like Empire and All My Children, appearances on shows from The Love Boat to Nurse Jackie, and lots of live theatre

For more on show business history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And please stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023..