Diahann Carroll, a versatile singer and stage actress who quietly blazed a trail for black women on American television in the late 1960s by playing a widowed nurse and single mother in "Julia," died Friday at age 84, said her manager, Brian Panella.
Carroll, whose career also was punctuated by a pioneering Tony Award and an Oscar nomination, had been suffering from cancer and died in her sleep at home in Los Angeles with her daughter by her side, Panella said by phone.
"She had been fighting it for quite some time, and did not want the world to know," said Panella, who had managed her career for 20 years.