CBS didn’t know what hit them, honey! Tony- and Emmy-winning legend Leslie Uggams is recalling the network’s response when she featured the multiracial funk-rock band Sly and the Family Stone on the first episode of The Leslie Uggams Show in September 1969. Following the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in June 1969, Uggams, whose eponymous show debuted that September, was breaking new ground as the first Black woman to host a weekly, one-hour variety series on national television.
“I had all of these wonderful people on the show,” Uggams, 81, says of guests like Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Johnny Mathis, and Sammy Davis Jr., all of whom appeared during the series’ 10-episode run. “They were all icons,” she continues. “A lot of them weren’t being seen, unless it was The Ed Sullivan Show, on a regular kind of basis. CBS had more Black people than they ever had before! It was great. I loved what we accomplished.”
The Leslie Uggams Show stands as one of several achievements in Uggams’ remarkable career on stage and screen. They include performing with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald at the Apollo Theater, earning praise (and an Emmy nomination) for her portrayal of Kizzy on the groundbreaking 1977 television miniseries Roots, becoming the first Black actress to play Mama Rose in an Equity production of Gypsy at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre in 2014, and appearing with Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
In fact, Marvel’s Deadpool franchise has introduced Uggams to a fervent fanbase from a whole other universe of entertainment. Her character, Blind Al, has appeared in all three Deadpool installments since 2016. Uggams’ rapport with Ryan Reynolds, who plays the title character, is certainly one of the reasons for the franchise’s success. “Ryan is such a sweetheart,” she says. “The man is brilliant. Off the set, he’s a quiet kind of man. He’s not ‘out there’ like some people that you sometimes work with. He just fascinates me because of the way he comes up with things.”
“We have a certain rhythm when we work together that is perfect for the two characters,” she adds. “We have the basic script, but we’re always trying new things because that’s how his mind works. He’ll say, ‘Leslie, do you mind saying such and such?’ and I’ll say, ‘Let’s go for it!’
She has a similar affection for Hugh Jackman. “I adore Hugh. He’s extremely talented,” says Uggams, who regaled Jackman between takes with stories from her celebrated career. “He was more interested in who I’d worked with as a kid, so we spent a lot of time talking about my early career years, more than anything. Plus, I’m married to an Aussie [Grahame Pratt, her longtime manager]. We talked a lot about Sydney because that’s where my husband is from.” (Jackman was born in Sydney.)
Uggams has also cultivated an entirely different audience through her role as Betty Pearson on Prime Video’s Fallout, a television series based on the post-apocalyptic video game that debuted in April 2024. “Let me give a shout-out to my fans because nothing goes past them,” she says. “I get a lot of fan mail that I answer. They go, ‘I’m not sure about Betty…’ You don’t know where she stands and that makes it interesting. I’m happy to see that the fans are getting her. I’m along for the ride, as they’re along for the ride. I love playing Betty because she’s really complex.”
One of the hallmarks of Uggams’ acting career has been taking on roles with complexity. Over the past decade, she’s added a range of characters to her repertoire that attest to her brilliance and versatility. Her role as matriarch Agnes Ellison opposite Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Sterling K. Brown in the Oscar-nominated 2023 film American Fiction explored the reality of living with Alzheimer’s, which affects nearly seven million people in the U.S., according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
“It doesn’t have a lot to do with age anymore, so it’s kind of frightening,” she notes about the disease. “I depend on my memory to learn scripts and songs. The frightening thing about it is there’s not a cure for it. You can’t take a pill, you can’t take a shot, so far, to help that. We’re living longer so that even makes it harder.”
“Agnes had always been the caretaker of the family and now, all of a sudden, the children have to take care of her,” she continues. “What is the decision? Put her in a home? Keep her with you? It’s frightening for the person that’s going through it, and it’s scary for the kids because all of a sudden it’s like they’re raising another child. There are facets of clarity that happen and then there are moments like, ‘Who is that person?’ It’s hard because you don’t want to be a burden. There’s great facilities out there but, a lot of times, people want to be home with the things that at least they’re familiar with. Who’s there for you to help you make that decision? Not everybody can do that. It’s a tough situation, and I felt that with American Fiction.”
For her Empire role as Leah Walker, who suffers from bipolar disorder, Uggams drew on childhood memories. “When I was growing up in my Washington Heights neighborhood, we had quite a few of those characters in the neighborhood, but back then, you didn’t have a name for it,” says Uggams, who played the mother of Terrence Howard’s Lucious Lyon from 2016–2020. “You just thought that somebody was either very eccentric or they had issues. I could say, ‘Oh, I remember Mrs. So and So … that’s what she was going through.’
The variety of characters that Uggams has played traces tremendous progress for several generations of Black actresses, dating back to the 1940s. In those days, Lena Horne was one of the very few Black women cast in Hollywood films. “When Lena was in the movies, they could take her scenes out of the movies when they played in the South,” says Uggams, who persevered above the politics of the business. “I walked through the door and said, ‘Hello world! Here I am. Aren’t you fortunate?’ [laughs] I believed in myself because my dad said to me, ‘Yes you can.’ If things didn’t work out, it was always a teaching moment that I took with me.”
Among those teaching moments was when CBS cancelled Uggams’ own television show after 10 weeks. Yet she remains proud of shepherding a pioneering hour of television. “Once the show was over, I thought to myself, ‘I think I was just here to take the heat off CBS and the fact that they fired The Smothers Brothers!'” she says, referring to her series’ daring predecessor. “Our show turned out better than what they thought they were going to get,” she adds. “That was the heartbreaking thing, because we were canceled, but it was also the wonderful thing because people loved the show.”
“We also had the Sugar Hill segment [which featured a working-class Black family] that was very, very popular, as well. We were before [the 1974–1979 sitcom] Good Times, which is interesting because John Amos was one of my writers on The Leslie Uggams Show and then he went on to be the dad on Good Times, and then he wound up being my dad in Roots!”
Uggams credits her training as a young performer at the Apollo Theater with preparing her for a life in all facets of show business, especially her Tony-winning Broadway debut in Hallelujah, Baby! (1967). She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Apollo, which was honored by the Kennedy Center in 2024 on the occasion of the theater’s 90th anniversary. “You learn your trade there, honey!” she says. “The audience at the Apollo took no prisoners. They would boo you in a second. It was better than any schooling that I ever had when it came to the arts because you were out on that stage and you had to make it work. We did 29 shows a week, so when I got to Broadway and you hear about eight shows a week, it was like ‘Been there, done that!’
“It was our Radio City Music Hall in Harlem,” she adds. “Everybody wanted to play the Apollo and have that on your résumé. I played the Apollo up until I was 16 years old. Then when I went on to do other things, they were very proud of what I had accomplished. I was very happy to say that I played the Apollo with some of the greats.”
One source of constant support throughout Uggams’ career has been her husband Grahame Pratt, with whom she shares two children. The two will celebrate 60 years of marriage in September, and the early years of their marriage — rare at the time because he was a White Australian — coincided with a period of tremendous racial unrest in the U.S.
What does she attribute to the success of their partnership? “I tell people that we were friends before we were lovers,” she says. “We really liked each other. We had great conversations. We viewed the world from different ways and in a lot of similar ways. We’re still laughing and we’re still holding hands. He’s been my best friend, and I think I’ve been his best friend.”
“He always had a great mind,” she continues. “My manager died, and I was kind of lost. People were talking to me about taking over the management of my career. No one had a vision. They had wanted me to stay in the lane that I had been in. One day I said to him, ‘Can you help me out?’ He finally becomes my manager, and the first job he got me was Roots! He got me that audition… and that’s all she wrote!”
Uggams continues to flourish with each new role, constantly exploring her range as one of the most multi-faceted performers in the business. “I’m a curious person,” she says, citing the key to her longevity. “I always say that I stand at the top of the mountain, and I’m willing to jump and see where I land.”
