Harold George Belafonte Jr. net worth is $28 Million. Also know about Harold George Belafonte Jr. bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Harold George Belafonte Jr. Wiki Biography

Harold George “Harry” Bellanfanti, Jr. is a singer, songwriter, actor and social activist born on 1st March, 1927 in Harlem, New York City USA, and as Harry Belafonte is one of the most successful Caribbean American pop stars in history, a three times Grammy Award winner, as well as an Emmy Award and a Tony Award winner, and the recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Belafonte has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 1987, and most recently a critic of the George W.Bush and Barack Obama policies.

Have you ever wondered how rich Harry Belafonte is? According to sources it has been estimated that Harry Belafonte’s overall net worth is $28 million, as of mid-2016, accumulated primarily thanks to his extremely successful musical career since the late 1940s. However, since he is still active in the media, his net worth continues to grow.

Born the oldest son of Caribbean immigrants, Harry grew up in New York City. His parents divorced when he was a young child and he was sent to Jamaica, where he lived with his relatives for a while. It was then that he first saw the oppression of blacks by the authorities, which made a big impact on him. In 1939, Belafonte returned to New York to live with his mother, who struggled in poverty. After he dropped out of high school, Harry enlisted in the US Navy in 1944, serving in the Pacific until the end of World War II, when he returned to New York to work a series of jobs before finding inspiration in an American Negro Theater performance he attended. This sparked Harry to become an actor, so he studied drama at the Dramatic Workshop run by Erwin Piscator, where one of his classmates was Marlon Brando.

Belafonte went on to appear in numerous American Negro Theater plays, but his big break came after he impressed Monte Kay while singing for a class project, and was then offered a chance to perform at the “Royal Roost” jazz club. Alongside his talented colleagues – musicians Charlie Parker and Miles Davis – Harry became popular in the club as well, making it to his first recording deal in 1949. However, by 1950 Harry had changed his musical style, favoring folk instead of popular music. He avidly studied traditional folk songs from around the world, and appeared in New York folk clubs. Belafonte debuted on Broadway in 1953 with his performance in “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac”, in which he sang several of his own songs, earning a Tony Award for his performance. His net worth was rising.

It was the mid ‘50s when Harry started his film career, appearing in his first movie “Bright Road” in 1953, and soon in Otto Preminger’s “Carmen-Jones”, in which he portrayed soldier Joe for which he received an Academy Award nomination. This success made Belafonte a star and he soon became a music sensation too. He released his “Calypso” album in 1956, which featured his view on traditional Caribbean folk music and introduced America to a new genre of music; the album sold one million copies.

Apart from his film and music career, Belafonte became the first African-American television producer. His later career included several other films and albums that didn’t achieve as much success as the previous. In 1995 he starred with John Travolta in “White Man’s Burden” which turned out to be a commercial disappointment.

However, Belafonte found his inspiration in activism. Harry met Martin Luther King in the 1950s and the two became good friends. He was next to King on many of his speeches, and participated in numerous protests and rallies.

Belafonte started supporting African artists in the mid-60s and led an effort to help people in Africa in the 1980s. He raised funds for those struck by famine in Ethiopia by recording the song “We Are the World” with several other famous artists like Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, Ray Charles, Diana Ross and Bruce Springsteen. The song was released in 1985 and raised millions of dollars. Belafonte is UNICEF’s goodwill ambassador and a strong critic of the current political system and regime in America.

When it comes to his private life, Harry has married three times. He has two daughters from his first marriage to Marguerite Byrd(1948-57), two children from his second marriage to dancer Julie Robinson(1957-2008), and a daughter with his wife Malena Mathiesen, who he married in 2009.

IMDB Wikipedia $28 Million 1.82 m 1927 1927-3-1 28000000 6′ 2″ (1.88 m) Actor Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer African American American Author Barack Obama Bruce Springsteen David Belafonte Dennis Belafonte Diana Ross Film producer Free to Be… You & Me (1974) Gina Belafonte Harlem Harold George Belafonte Jr. Harold George Bellanfanti Harry Belafonte Net Worth John Travolta Julie Robinson m. 1957–2008 Manhattan March 1 Marguerite Belafonte (m. 1948–1957) Marguerite Byrd Marlon Brando Martin Luther King Michael Jackson Miles Davis New York City New York Pamela Frank (m. 2008) Pisces producer Ray Charles Shari Belafonte Sing Your Song (2011) Singer Social activist Songwriter Soundtrack Sr. Television Producer The New School The Player (1992) U.S. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)

Harold George Belafonte Jr. Quick Info

Harold George Belafonte Jr. Quotes

• [on first meeting Martin Luther King] He had said that we would take maybe twenty or thirty minutes to just talk. It was almost four hours when we finally broke for breath.
• We who came back from [World War II], having expectations and finding that there were none to be harvested, were put upon to make a decision. We could accept the status quo as it was beginning to reveal itself, with those repressive laws still in place. Or, as had begun to appear on the horizon, stimulated by something Mahatma Gandhi of India had done, we could start this quest for social change by confronting the state a little differently. Let’s do it non-violently, let’s use passive thinking applied to aggressive ideas, and perhaps we could overthrow the oppression by making it morally unacceptable.
• [on planning for ‘The March on Washington’, August 28, 1963] In my instruction to my fellow artists when we met several times discussing strategy for what to do, I said, ‘The more we can find ourselves in the heart of the people gathered at the event, the more we can be seen and identified with the everyday citizen, the more we are all linking arms together – not just celebrity to celebrity, but a truck driver, a dentist or a housewife – and we’re all linking arms together, the more powerful that imagery becomes’. My task was to make sure that we salt-and-peppered the afternoon into the early evening to look that way.
• [on ‘The March on Washington’] In the end, the day was a complete win-win. The Kennedys heaved a huge sigh of relief that there was not one act of violence. And to see at the end everybody singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and all the arms linked – we’ve said it often, but it’s worth saying as often as necessary – there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. And it was all of America. All of it. You went through that crowd and you couldn’t find any type missing, any gender, any race, any religion. It was America at its most transformative moment.
• When my mother gave birth to me, the city so terrified her-the intensity of it, the complicated way people pass through people’s lives-she thought the best thing to do was to take her children back to the Caribbean, let them be raised by the village, and then at some point bring them back to America. I stayed in the Caribbean from 1 and a half to 12.
• One of the things that made New York particularly complicated was that there were no laws in the state or on the books that segregated its citizens. There was no law on the book that said, “A black person cannot live here. A black person cannot eat here. A black person cannot go to school here.” It was all something we just understood. We didn’t go below 110th Street. We didn’t go north of 150th Street … or 145th Street. We didn’t go farther west than Riverside Drive-well, I guess there’s not much farther to go there! And we didn’t go farther east than the East River. That was our ghetto.
• I believe that my time was a remarkable one. I am aware that we now live in a world overrun by cruelty and destruction, and as our earth disintegrates and our spirits numb we lose moral purpose and creative vision. But still I must believe, as I always have, that our best times lie ahead, and in the final analysis, along the way we will be comforted by one another. That is my song.
• I was good as a singer, but I wasn’t the best, and I’d known that from the start. I had to rely on my acting. And in the end I could make a case that I was the greatest actor in the world: I’d convinced everyone I could sing.
• In the days of slavery there were those slaves who lived on the plantation, in shacks out back, and those who lived in the master’s house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master well. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.
• To me, faith as practiced all around me was blindly tied to religion, and religion was preachers in Harlem and Jamaica passing the hat for Jesus and driving off in fancy cars. It was nuns invoking the Christian spirit and rapping my knuckles with sticks. It was priests blessing Italian troops on the newsreels, sending them off to slaughter defenseless Ethiopians. I failed to see any good in the hypocrisy of that.
• Knowing I was playing to an influential crowd, I’d snuck a little politics, with new lines for old songs, like ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’: ‘Mississippi on your knees, Hallelujah!/ Another bus is on the way, Hallelujah.’
• I wasn’t an artist who became an activist. I was an activist who became an artist. Ever since my mother had drummed it into me, I’d felt the need to fight injustice wherever I saw it, in whatever way I could.
• [on Harlem, 2011] One of the foremost things that we suffer from, for children, is the lack of models, of tangible role models. A lot of us, as kids, had no such problems. Because then, a lot of the achievers were also required to live in the middle of Harlem, or in the South Side of Chicago. ‘Rich nigs’ couldn’t go anywhere. We saw Robeson. We saw Duke Ellington: he lived with us. Now, none of those heroic figures live in Bed-Stuy or the heart of Harlem. Now they live in Martha’s Vineyard, Fire Island. In California, they live in Beverly Hills.
• People from the Caribbean did not respond to America’s repressions in the same way that black Americans did. We were constantly in a state of rebellion, constantly in a state of thinking way above that which we were given. My people were gangsters and lived in the underworld. And I don’t mean major American crime. I mean, as an immigrant, if you can’t find work within the law, you find work outside the law. Running numbers and so on. Which is, of course, a characteristic of the poor, who find ways to break the rules, since the rules are always stacked against them.
• I’ve always looked at the world and thought what can I do next? Where do we go from here? How can we fix it? And that’s still how I look at the world, because there is so much to be done. The whole world is caught in human suffering. And those who professed about making change have not come up with answers. We have failed in terms of the moral side. We have to do more.
• No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush, says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people support your revolution. – Remarks made to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in January 2006
• On “Larry King Live (1985),” October, 2002, clarifying his comments on Colin Powell: “It is my personal feeling that plantations exist all over America. If you walk into South Central Los Angeles, into Watts, or you walk into Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, you’ll find people who live lives that are as degrading as anything that slavery had ever produced. They live in economic oppression, they live in a disenfranchised way. In the hearts and minds of those people, and millions of others, you’re always looking for hope, and whenever somebody within our tribe, within our group, emerges that has the position of authority and power to make a difference in the way business is done, our expectations run high. Many times, those expectations are not fulfilled. But when such an individual is in the service of those who not only perpetuate the oppression, but sometimes design the way in which it is applied, it then becomes very, very, very, very critical that we raise our voices and be heard.”
• Unless you have had the experience of sitting in a village in war-ravaged Guatemala, or a humble, box-like room in the wretched South African township of Alexandra, or in a dust-covered hovel on a Native American reservation, or in the tin shacks that house the thousands who live desperate lives in East Kingston Jamaica, or in an overcrowded, below-poverty-level dwelling in a Ghetto in New York, Chicago, or Detroit, among people whose lives are dominated by their bitter struggle for existence and some bit of dignity, unless you’ve seen from these places the looks on the faces of small children as they watched Sesame Street or the Muppets, you’ll never really understand what Jim and his colleagues have done for millions of children all over the world, children who have never smiled, nor dared to dream, had it not been for Jim Henson. I come from those places; I know these faces. Through them I came to fully appreciate Jim.

Harold George Belafonte Jr. Important Facts

• $1,800 /week
• He was a friend of Martin Luther King.
• Vocal, public supporter in 2013–along with other celebs such as Susan Sarandon–of Democrat Bill de Blasio as the next Mayor of New York City.
• Father-in-law of Malena Belafonte.
• Is a long time friend of fellow actor and activist Sidney Poitier. They were born 9 days apart. They met in New York at age 20 before either was in show business.
• He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6721 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood,California.
• Appeared in the 1946 American Negro Theatre play “Days of Our Youth” in 1946. Sidney Poitier eventually replaced Harry and was spotted by a talent agent who ignited his Hollywood career.
• Has been awarded six Gold Records.
• Has received Grammy Awards for the albums Swing That Hammer (1960) and An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba (1965). The latter album featuring legendary African singer Miriam Makeba dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.
• Son David is executive director of the family-held company Belafonte Enterprises Inc.
• A veteran critic of U.S. foreign policy, his controversial political statements on this subject in the early 1980s have included opposing the U.S. embargo on Cuba, praising Soviet peace initiatives, attacking the U.S. invasion of Grenada, praising the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, honoring Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and praising Fidel Castro. On a Martin Luther King Day speech at Duke University in 2006, Belafonte compared the American government to the 9/11 terrorists.
• Achieved widespread attention for his political views in 2002 when he began making a series of negative comments about President George W. Bush, his administration and the Iraq War.
• In 1968, Belafonte appeared on a Petula Clark TV special on NBC. In the middle of a song, Clark smiled and briefly touched Belafonte’s arm. The show’s sponsor, Plymouth Motors, wanted to cut out the segment, but Clark, who had ownership of the special, told NBC that the performance would be shown intact or not at all. American newspapers published articles reporting the controversy and, when the special aired, it grabbed huge ratings.
• Appeared on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and performed a controversial “Mardi Gras” number with footage intercut from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. CBS censors deleted the entire segment from the program.
• In 1985, he was one of the organizers behind the Grammy Award winning song “We Are the World,” a multi-artist effort to raise funds for Africa, and performed in the Live Aid concert that same year.
• His triumphant success as an entertainer in the arts did not protect him from racial discrimination, particularly in the South. As a result, he refused to perform in the southern region of the U.S. from 1954 until 1961.
• He was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994, and he won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
• Was the first African-American man to win an Emmy, with his first solo TV special “Tonight with Belafonte” in 1959.
• His album Midnight Special (1962) featured the first-ever recorded appearance by a then young harmonica player named Bob Dylan.
• Father-in-law of Sam Behrens and Scott McCray and Malena Belafonte.
• He was a close friend of Burt Lancaster.
• He was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts in 1994 by the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington D.C.
• Performed “Turn the World Around” at Jim Henson’s memorial service.
• Underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1996.
• Won Broadway’s 1954 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Musical) for “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac,” becoming the first Black performer to win a Tony Award.
• An admirer and personal pal of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
• Has a granddaughter, Sarafina and a grandson, Amadeus.
• Served in the United States Navy.
• A best-selling artist on RCA Victor records, his most successful albums with the label have included “Calypso”, “Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean”, “Belafonte at Carnegie Hall”, “Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall”, “Jump Up Calypso”, “My Lord, What a Mornin'”, “Belafonte at the Greek Theater”, “The Midnight Special”, “Streets I Have Walked”, “Belefonte Sings of Love” and “Homeward Bound”.
• Recorded the first million-selling LP album with “Calypso” (RCA: 1956), which started a craze for this traditional Jamaican folk music in the United States.
• Always outspoken in his beliefs, he created controversy in October of 2002 when he made disparaging remarks about Secretary of State Colin Powell. Far from being upset, Powell reportedly took the remarks good-humoredly, refusing to inflame the situation any further.
• Father, with Marguerite Byrd (aka Marguerite Belafonte), of Shari Belafonte.
• Father, with Julie Robinson, of Gina Belafonte and David Belafonte.
• He won a Tony in 1953 for “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.”.
• Born at 10:30am-EST

Harold George Belafonte Jr. Filmography

Harold George Belafonte Jr. Awards