May Britt, the Swedish-born actress whose marriage to the Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. in 1960 drew racist reactions in Hollywood and elsewhere as the civil rights movement was gathering momentum, died on Dec. 11 in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her son Mark Davis announced the death, at a hospital, in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
Ms. Britt, whose first name was pronounced “My,” was an up-and-coming movie star when she met Mr. Davis at a Los Angeles nightclub in 1959.
The civil rights movement was then making gains against school segregation and workplace discrimination but having far less impact regarding the laws and mores around intimate relationships. Interracial marriage, while legal in California, was still illegal in many American states — it wasn’t until 1967 that it was legalized nationwide by the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia — and interracial dating was considered taboo even in supposedly liberal places like Hollywood.
After Ms. Britt and Mr. Davis began dating, they became the target of death threats, streams of hate mail and neo-Nazi pickets outside venues where Mr. Davis was performing. The reaction grew only more intense when they announced their engagement in July 1960.
The intolerance spread into that year’s presidential campaign, during which Mr. Davis was a vocal supporter of Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee. At the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in July, Mr. Davis was booed by delegates from Southern states.
“You know as well as I do why they booed,” Mr. Davis told a reporter from United Press International.
The couple planned their wedding for that October but ended up pushing it back to November. It took place in Hollywood; Frank Sinatra served as best man, and several other members of the Rat Pack were in attendance — including Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy’s sister Patricia. (Mr. Davis was a core member of the group, known for performing in Las Vegas together.)
Not long afterward, the columnist Drew Pearson reported that the wedding had been delayed because of pressure from the Kennedy campaign, which believed that the ceremony would draw negative attention before the election. Others later contended that Kennedy had ordered his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, to disinvite Mr. Davis from performing at an Inaugural party at the White House in 1961.
Mr. Davis repeated both allegations in conversations with his and Ms. Britt’s daughter, Tracey Davis, who related them in her 2014 memoir, “Sammy Davis Jr.: A Personal Journey with My Father.”
Ms. Britt’s marriage to Mr. Davis largely brought her film career to an end after a promising start. She had begun acting in Italy, where she starred in 11 movies produced by Carlo Ponti, before going to Hollywood in 1957 on a contract with 20th Century-Fox.
She appeared in a string of high-profile films, including “The Young Lions” (1958), opposite Marlon Brando and Dean Martin, and “The Hunters” (1958), opposite Robert Mitchum. In a 1959 remake of “The Blue Angel,” she played the lead, Lola-Lola, a role that Marlene Dietrich made famous in the 1930 original.
Ms. Britt appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1959. In a profile that year, the syndicated columnist Hedda Hopper called her “the most interesting Swede to hit Hollywood since Garbo.”
Her last major film was “Murder, Inc.” (1960), in which she played the wife of a singer caught up with the mob. Bosley Crowther, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, called her performance “taut and poignant.”
But that year, 20th Century-Fox did not renew her contract. While the studio cited poor box-office results for “The Blue Angel,” Ms. Britt, Mr. Davis and others suspected that it was because of their interracial relationship.
Majbritt Wilkens was born on March 22, 1934, on Lidingo, an island suburb of Stockholm. Her father, Hugo, was a postal clerk, and her mother, Hillevi, kept the home.
She got her big break at 18. She was working as a photographer’s assistant when Mr. Ponti and Mario Soldati, an Italian writer and director, came into the studio to look at pictures of actresses for an upcoming film.
Instead, they hired Ms. Wilkens, who moved to Rome with her mother and adopted the screen name May Britt.
Her Italian films included adventure-melodramas like “Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair” (1953) and “The Ship of Condemned Women” (1953), as well as a sprawling, star-studded adaptation of “War and Peace” (1956), which Mr. Ponti produced with Dino De Laurentiis for Paramount Pictures.
It was her role as Sonya Rostova in that movie that won her attention from Hollywood and a studio contract.
In 1958, Ms. Britt married a wealthy young Stanford student named Ed Gregson. They divorced a year later.
After becoming engaged to Mr. Davis, Ms. Britt converted to Judaism, a step he had recently taken as well. She gave birth to their daughter, Tracey, in 1961. They later adopted two sons, Mark and Jeff, before divorcing in 1968 after Mr. Davis admitted to an affair with the singer Lola Falana. Tracey Davis died in 2020. Ms. Britt married Lennert Rindquist in 1993. He died in 2017.
Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Margot; and five grandchildren.
After her divorce from Mr. Davis, Ms. Britt, who had remained in Los Angeles, returned to acting, though usually in small parts in films and in guest spots on TV series. Her last film credit was in the 1976 horror film “Haunts.” Her last TV credit was a 1988 episode of “Probe,” a science fiction series.
Ms. Britt and Mr. Davis remained friendly until his death in 1990 at 64.
“I loved Sammy,” she told Vanity Fair in 1999, “and I had the chance to marry the man I loved.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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