Ellen Holly, whose star turn in the soap opera “One Life to Live” made her the first Black actor to play a lead role in daytime TV, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.
Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, confirmed her death in a statement. No cause was given.
Ms. Holly was born in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1931, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her parents were William Garnet Holly, a chemical engineer, and Grayce Holly, a writer. Relatives included several prominent figures in the civil rights movement.
After graduating from Hunter College, she debuted on Broadway in 1956 in “Too Late the Phalarope,” then went on to perform in several other Broadway productions.
In 1968, Ms. Holly wrote in The New York Times about the difficulty of finding roles as a Black woman with lighter skin. The column caught the attention of a television producer, Agnes Nixon, who gave Ms. Holly the groundbreaking role of Carla that would catapult her to fame after “One Life to Live” launched on ABC. She played the role from 1968 to 1980 and 1983-’85.
The character for a time passed as white, before revealing that she was Black, amid a love triangle with two doctors: one white and the other Black. When her character appeared to be in an interracial relationship with a Black man, a station in Texas canceled the show, and Ms. Nixon, the producer, received hate mail, she said in an interview in 1997.
“A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 interview, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”
She wrote about her experience in a New York Times column in 1969, writing that she found the storyline of a Black woman passing as white “fascinating.”
“I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could,” she wrote, because unlike a play or movie, viewers would follow the character for months.
“The emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater,” she wrote, “and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial. A lot of whites who think they aren’t prejudiced — are. It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to confront their own prejudices.”
Ms. Holly wrote that while she called herself Black, she also had French, English and Shinnecock ancestry.
Ms. Holly wrote an autobiography, “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress,” which was published in 1996. Over the years, she wrote opinion columns for The New York Times about the arts, race and civil rights.
After retiring from acting, she became a librarian in the 1990s, working at the White Plains Public Library for years.
Ms. Holly, who never married or had children, is survived by several grand-nieces, cousins and other family members.
