It seems that she was the first person of colour (her ancestry being South Asian as well as African) to gain a contract in Hollywood. Moreover, it was given her by DW Griffith for a bit part on Birth of a Nation, the movie which is credited with reviving the fortunes of the Ku Klux Klan.
An article on Jstor states:
No one knows where the name Madame Sul-Te-Wan came from. It belonged to Nellie Wan, a black vaudeville actress from Louisville who adopted the moniker when she transitioned to film in the mid-1910s. But the origins of her stage name have always been murky. NYU film professor Donald Bogle believes it was her way of avoiding racist condescension, since at the time, white Southerners often addressed black women by their first names, or “Aunt.”
[From running her own dance company to marrying, moving to California, and then being dumped by her husband with three young sons, she needed money fast]
Griffith was in the middle of filming Nation, his blockbuster revisionist history of the Reconstruction era, when Sul-Te-Wan approached him. As Regester notes, there are conflicting accounts on what she said or did to catch his attention—at least one story features a costume of “a red satin turban, long shiny braids that nearly reached her knees, and shiny gold earrings.” But she evidently sold Griffith on her pitch. He gave her a job, paying her a salary of $3 a day. That initial offer eventually increased to a $25-per-week contract, the film critic Ashley Clark writes.
Thereafter, her work was prolific, though
Sul-Te-Wan was rarely mentioned in the mainstream white press outside the occasional cast list, though her turn as Tituba, a slave and accused witch in Maid of Salem, garnered some rare notice.
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