BIN Exclusive: Melba Moore Talks New Memoir

Tony Award-winning actress, activist, and singer Melba Moore talks with BIN News anchor Esther Dillard about her decades-long career and her newly released memoir, Marvelous and Getting Better.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Esther Dillard on Your Home for twenty four to
seven news the Black Information Network. Here are your top stories.
Rodney and Holly Robinson Pete are talking about a new
health initiative around two hundred and fifty people in Charlotte,
North Carolina. Around it up in immigration rates, a black
councilman speaks out, and Tony Award winning and Grammy nominated

(00:21):
legend Melbae Moore has released a memoir to share her
life's lessons over decades in the spotlight. It's called This
Is It Marvelous and Getting Better. The eighty year old actress, singer,
and activist was extremely candid about her life looking back.
Was there a certain film or a certain Broadway play
that you felt really made you who you are today?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Definitely? It was Pearly because it probably was my second play,
my second experience with any kind of theater at all,
because I didn't go to the theater to know about it.
So I was learning on the job, and so it
defined me. I remember sometimes standing in front of the
audience once I had learned the script and which way
was stage left, which way was stage right? Oh, because

(01:06):
you're so focused, because you're not trained at it and
you have a different kind of attention that you give
to it. So now looking back at that, so I
remember that moment, I'm saying, oh no, we gotta say
you're lying to remember, you know, and you can't be
in New YORKA. You have to be the Southern person
that you auditionly got this job for and didn't you

(01:27):
go to do it? But you're doing it and it's
all happening at once and things. But looking back now,
that was definitely one defining moment because that, of course
I can look back and see you got Antonia Ward
for that. You didn't even know what that was.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Then. Melmble won the Tony Award in nineteen seventy for
Best Featured Actress in a Musical for a breakout role
as Luda Belle Gussie May Jenkins in the Broadway musical Pearly.
She told me she believes much of her success started
with her foundation at home, raised by her mother and

(02:01):
a caretaker named Ludy May Hawkins while living in Newark,
New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
The lady who raised me was an orphan, illiterate domestic
and she was raised by sharecroppers. You know, the sharecroppers
don't even own the farm. They don't own nothing. But
I think she's the reason why, even though I had
no theater or acting training experience, I got the Tony
Award for Loudie Bell Gussie May Jenkins because that's who
she was.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
She says, faith and family have helped her through turbulent
financial times and lows, like living through the pandemic. It
was then in twenty twenty she was prompted to write
her memoir, which she says was only possible by embracing forgiveness.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
And I'm so glad that I did this. So I'm
a Christian, I'm purport to be that, and I think
prior to this and some of the things that have
happened to my now ex husband have happened to him.
There's never no way in the world, ohay in hell,
we could have had any kind of relationship except a
hateful one. What you were supposed to be? What you

(03:01):
say you don't know how to do that, Well, let's
learn how to forgive it, and let's learn to think
about what was your part in it.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Her book, This Is It Marvelous in Getting Better is
now available online and wherever books are sold. I'm esther
Dillard on your home for black news. First, the Black
Information Network