McQueen, Thelma (“Butterfly”)

(b. 8 January 1911 in Tampa, Florida; d. 22 December 1995 in Augusta, Georgia), character actress legendary for her role as the maid Prissy in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.

McQueen was the only child of a stevedore, Wallace McQueen, and a domestic worker, Mary Richardson. Deserted by her father at the age of five, Thelma lived with an aunt in Augusta until her mother found employment in Harlem in New York City. She attended school in Tampa and Augusta, and completed her high school education in suburban Babylon on Long Island, New York. She developed an interest in performing while reciting passages from the Bible in school. She briefly studied nursing at the Lincoln Training School in the Bronx, before quitting in 1935 to pursue a stage career. She joined Venezuela Jones’s Harlem-based Youth Theatre Group and studied dancing with Katherine Dunham, Geoffrey Holder, and Janet Collins.

McQueen made her stage debut as part of the Butterfly Ballet in Venezuela Jones’s off-Broadway production of Swingin’ the Dream in 1935. She was dubbed “Butterfly” during the production, and the name remained with her throughout her life. She made her Broadway debut in New York in the George Abbott production of Brown Sugar (1937). The show ran for only four performances, but McQueen’s contribution was favorably reviewed and Abbott next cast her in Brother Rat (1937) and What A Life (1938).

Her screen career began in 1939 when she was cast in the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s maid Prissy in Gone with the Wind. Playing a fourteen-year-old slave girl, McQueen delivers one of the most famous lines in cinema history, made especially memorable by her high-pitched voice and convincing hysteria: “Lawdy Miz Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies.” The author Donald Bogle wrote that “Butterfly could take a big scene and condense it into the tiniest of lyrical poems.” Because the movie premiered in an all-white theater, McQueen could not attend the opening. Although unhappy about playing such a stereotyped character, McQueen realized that she was taking part in a legendary film that might open up other opportunities to her as an actress. Her appearance in the film brought her not only fame but criticism later from people who considered the role demeaning. She appeared in a second film in 1939, The Women, which was also a box office success.

Her subsequent screen appearances were, for the most part, based on the Prissy role; she repeated the squeaky-voiced foolish maids in Affectionately Yours (1941), I Dood It (1943), Mildred Pierce and Flame of the Barbary Coast (both 1945), and Duel in the Sun (1946). She also appeared in the 1943 musical Cabin in the Sky. By the late 1940s, however, her film career was languishing, primarily because she refused to accept any more maid parts. She left Hollywood and returned to New York, where she attended City College, taking courses in political science, Spanish, drama, and dance.

The decades of the 1950s and 1960s were lean years for McQueen. For a brief period (1950–1952) she played Oriole, the dizzy neighbor on the television series Beulah. In 1951 she staged a one-woman show at Carnegie Hall. In 1956 she was in the unsuccessful all-black play The World’s My Oyster, and in 1957 she appeared on stage in an off-Broadway production of Molière’s comedy The School for Wives and in a television production of Marc Connelly’s all-black biblical drama The Green Pastures. Meanwhile, she worked at various nonacting jobs as a factory worker, a dishwasher, and a companion, among others, to sustain herself. She moved to Augusta, Georgia, in 1957, where she had her own radio show, opened a restaurant, took a nursing course at the Georgia Medical School, and managed a community service club for black children.

McQueen returned to the Harlem stage in the role of Ora in The Athenian Touch in 1964. Her next theater appearance was in the off-Broadway production of Curley McDimple (1968). She made two other appearances in the 1960s: her own musical, McQueen and Friends, and the Abbott production of Three Men on a Horse. In the 1970s she returned to films with a cameo role in The Phynx (1970) and a small role in Amazing Grace (1974). In 1975 she was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. That same year, at the age of sixty-four, McQueen received a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the City College of New York, the culmination of coursework she had undertaken at several colleges starting in 1946. In 1976 she staged her second one-woman show, Prissy in Person. In 1978 she put together a New York nightclub act and in 1979 won an Emmy for her role in the children’s television special The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody.

In 1980 McQueen sued the Greyhound Bus Lines after being roughed up by security guards who accused her of being a pickpocket based on her appearance. In the 1980s she had a small role in The Mosquito Coast (1986), roles in the television documentary series our World (1987) and in two television movies, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1981) and Polly (1989), and a cameo role in the Sam Irwin film Stiff (1989). With the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Gone with the Wind, McQueen was again in the limelight.

“My main job is community work,” McQueen once said. “Show business is only my hobby.” Never having married, she worked as a volunteer in the offices of city politicians and served as playground supervisor at an elementary school (P.S. 153) in Harlem, worked for racial equality, animal rights, environmental protection, and urban beautification. An atheist who felt strongly about the separation of church and state, McQueen was also a member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

McQueen died at the Augusta Regional Medical Center on 23 December 1995 from burns covering over 70 percent of her body, which she received in a house fire. Her body was donated for medical research.

In the 1950s and 1960s McQueen began to refuse roles that exploited racial stereotyping, and she became publicly assertive about the rights of African Americans to a “just” representation in the cinema, a brave stance that likely accounts for the way her career came to a virtual standstill during that era. A selfless person whose integrity was often in conflict with the roles she was offered, McQueen was a proud and independent woman whose reputation as an actress centers on her portrayal of the fragile and hysterical Prissy in Gone with the Wind.

A good source of information on McQueen’s career can be found in Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Film (1973). Most biographical information on McQueen is found in short entries in many biographical sources, newspapers, and magazines. Longer biographical sketches can be found in Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 6 (1994), Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2d ed., vol. 10 (1998), and Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women (1992). The volume edited by Smith also gives a good analysis of her film and theater roles. An interview with McQueen appeared in People (1 Dec. 1986). Obituaries are in the Washington Post, Atlanta Daily World, and New York Times (all 23 Dec. 1995).

Joyce K. Thornton