Juanita Moore

Biography: African-American actress Juanita Moore entered films in the early '50s, a time in which few black actresses were given much to do in major-studio films. Fortunately, Juanita's roles began improving as Hollywood tentatively developed a social consciousness toward the end of the decade. In 1959, she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Imitation of Life (1959), a glossy updating of a once-controversial Fannie Hurst novel about racial inequity. Within the next decade Hollywood underwent several sociological upheavals, and Juanita Moore was one of the beneficiaries; she became a fixture of such black-oriented films of the '70s as Uptight (1969), Thomasine and Bushrod (1974) and Abby (1974). She continued to work sporatically through the 1980s and '90s, appearing as a grandmother in Disney's The Kid (2000) and in an episode of Judging Amy in 2001. Moore died in 2014 at age 99.