There are many Black actors and actresses who moved through the background of classic films like they moved through Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s – quietly working and trying to preserve their dignity.

One of my favorites has always been Mantan Moreland, a gifted comedian and comic actor who was usually reduced to playing manservants in films of the 1930s and 1940s. In horror films, he often played the comic relief, and his performances – no doubt the result of the film’s direction and the culture of the time – seem pretty over the top, stereotyped and problematic now. He made dozens of films from the early 1930s and into the 1970s.

I watched two Moreland films in recent days, “King of the Zombies” from 1941 and “Revenge of the Zombies” from 1943. “Revenge” is a low-budget remake of “King” and is a little more polished but the plot is basically the same: A mad scientist on a remote island works to create an army of zombies, the walking dead, for Hitler. A small group comes to the island and foils the plan. Moreland is funny in both and John Carradine enlivens “Revenge” as the mad doctor.

But I watched the two films for another cast member who I was surprised I’d never heard of in all my decades of watching horror films, an actress known as Madame Sul-Te-Wan.

The actress, born Nellie Crawford in 1873, was the first African-American actress to sign a film contract. She had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, and her parents had been slaves. She had small roles in the Klan-glorifying “Birth of a Nation” in 1915 and was paid $3 a day for filming and had a contract worth $25 a week for work in films by director D.W. Griffith.

She appeared in Tarzan films and in “mammy” roles and she was in the 1933 classic “King Kong.” Despite the limitations Hollywood put on Black performers (and filmmakers) she worked steadily over the decades. She worked so often in part because she was a fine actress but also because she could believably play roles of many ethnicities. An April 1928 article noted that she was “from the Orient.” Others cited that she was born in Hawaii, contradicting that she was born in Louisville. Ah, Hollywood publicity!

In the twin “Zombie” movies, she plays largely the same role, an old woman in the mad doctor’s household who not only knows about the existence of zombies but in the first film performs the voodoo ritual that creates them. 

In later films, her roles were memorable even when she wasn’t credited as prominently as she was in the two zombie films. Notably, she played Dorothy Dandridge’s grandmother in “Carmen Jones” in 1954. 

In March 1944, the California Eagle newspaper reported on the party thrown for her 71st birthday. More than 500 people attended, the newspaper reported. The Eagle largely reported on prominent Black figures and, as early as 1928, had praised “this plucky little woman.”

In February 1959, the Eagle reported that Sul-Te-Wan had died following a stroke at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, a nursing facility in which many prominent show business figures of the era lived in their declining years. 

In its obituary for Sul-Te-Wan, the Los Angeles Times noted she had “played in several hundred motion pictures since 1915.” 

She certainly deserved to be better known.