Della Reese

Detroit, then gospel, then jazz, then everything else. Reese was a singer first and a very successful one: her single Don't You Know? reached number two on the American Hot 100 in 1959, and she recorded across blues, gospel, jazz and pop rather than settling in any of them. She was the first Black woman to host her own talk show, and by the 1960s she was a familiar television face on The Mike Douglas Show, where she was billed as co-hostess, and on the panel and quiz circuit at Match Game and Hollywood Squares.

The acting arrived alongside it and never stopped. She played Grace Dayton on The Bold Ones: The New Doctors, Della Rogers on Chico and the Man, turned up on Welcome Back, Kotter and Crazy like a Fox, and did all of it with a voice that could go from hospitality to threat inside one line.

That is what Eddie Murphy hired in 1989. As Vera in Harlem Nights she is the funniest and most physical thing in the film, and the part depends entirely on an audience believing she will not back down.

Her largest role was Tess, the senior angel on Touched by an Angel, a network drama built on her authority and her singing, and she carried the same character over to Promised Land. She was an ordained minister by then, which fit the work. Later credits include Mrs. Towner in Beauty Shop and the voice of Eema in Disney's Dinosaur. She died in 2017.