On Friday, friends asked if I would join them at opening night of Sing Your Song, Susanne Rostock’s documentary on Harry Belafonte. I needed no convincing; a film dedicated to Mr. Belafonte, that dreamy 1950s icon with the voice as sweet and smooth as melted milk chocolate could not fail to entertain. Thanks to their irresistible melodies (and some duets with the Muppets), the songs that Belafonte popularized in the ’50s and ’60s were still a part of the collective soundtrack of childhood in the 1980s, when I was a kid. At twenty, when I got my first apartment and my first non-Fischer Price record player, I lovingly appropriated my father’s Belafonte records. I listened to them and pretended I was living in the early 1960s rather than the early 2000s, while I danced around my Chelsea studio in a vintage silver lamé dress with my hair teased high.

I used to be a cinephile. I was an actress. For three years I wrote script coverage for production companies while I lived in Los Angeles. But most modern movies disenchant me, and other than serving as tools for distraction, it’s a rare film that educates, challenges, inspires and delivers joy at once, as Sing Your Song does so completely.

The documentary traces Belafonte’s life from a unprivileged childhood in Harlem and Jamaica, on tour as his singing career takes off (though he is forced to use separate doors to theaters from his white co-stars), and to Hollywood, where his incendiary presence challenged cultural taboos on the big screen. His roles in films such as Island in the Sun (1957) and The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) provoked outrage in small-minded individuals, shocked by the implied romance manifested as innocently as mere on-screen hand-holding. Belafonte knew that he was in a unique position to challenge the injustices of segregation and race-related prejudices. He took up a greater cause than that simply of an entertainer or artist. Belafonte dedicated his life to civil rights and social activism, using his celebrity, charm, intelligence and wit to advocate change and create a more humane world.

As I walked out of the IFC into the bustling cold of Sixth Avenue on a Saturday night, I thought of the film Forest Gump. Like the fictional eponymous character, Belafonte was present at an astonishing number of historically remarkable events, conferring with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., JFK and Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton. In Forest Gump, there is irony in Gump’s ubiquitousness given his mental limitations (to put it as he did, he was “not a smart man”). Belafonte, however, is fiercely perceptive and intelligent, well-spoken and talented, but given the historical circumstances of his adulthood, Belafonte was likely to be limited by the color of his skin. Everything about Belafonte defies the concept of limitations. He used his gifts to shrewdly foster change and connect leaders to the masses. He is stoic and steadfast, refusing to be diverted from his path toward justice. At age eighty, he still tirelessly works on behalf of youths and minorities to try to right the mistakes that humanity can’t seem to stop perpetuating.

Now, even after seeing the film, as I watch clips of Belafonte it’s easy to get lost in those dark eyes below the chiseled brow—to admire his features and frame and forget for a moment that he is much more than a pretty face with a captivating croon. Perhaps that was his trick. As performer Paul Robeson advises him, “Get them to sing your song and they will want to know who you are. And if they want to know who you are, you’ve gained the first step in bringing truth and insight that might help people get through this rather difficult world.”

Those compassion-breeding words are ones to live by.

As an appreciative nod to Harry Belafonte’s heritage, click here for a recipe for Caribbean Shrimp with Spicy Chili and Beer Sauce from Bon Appetit, January 2003.

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