In honor of TCM and their “Summer Under the Stars” series, we launch our companion series, Summer Madness. The series will spotlight the achievements and films of one Black actor, daily throughout the month of August.
Day 16
Rosalind Cash (December 31, 1938 – October 31, 1995) was an American singer and actress. Her best-known film role is as Charlton Heston’s character’s love interest Lisa, in the 1971 science fiction film, The Omega Man. To soap opera audiences, she is best remembered as Mary Mae Ward on General Hospital from 1994 to 1995.
Cash appeared in the 1962 revival of Fiorello! and was an original member of the Negro Ensemble Company, founded in 1968. In 1973, she played the role of Goneril in King Lear at the New York Shakespeare Festival alongside James Earl Jones’s Lear.
Her other television credits include What’s Happening!!, Good Times, Kojak, Barney Miller, Benson, Police Woman, Family Ties, Head of the Class, and many others. Cash was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the Public Broadcasting Service production of Go Tell it on the Mountain. She had an amusing cameo on The Golden Girls, playing Dorothy’s future daughter-in-law. In 1996, she was posthumously nominated for an Emmy Award, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, for her role on General Hospital.
Cash’s films included Klute (1971), The New Centurions (1972) with George C. Scott, Uptown Saturday Night (1974) with Sidney Poitier, and Wrong Is Right (1982). In 1995, she appeared in Tales from the Hood, her last film appearance.
Cash died of cancer on October 31, 1995, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. #SummerMadness #Cash
Recommended films:
Klute (’71)
Melinda (’72)
Uptown Saturday Night (’74)
Cornbread, Earl and Me (’75)
Tales From the Hood (’95)
