Before falling in love, Hollywood actresses Georg Stanford Brown and Tyne Daly experienced persecution for breaking social standards. Interracial marriage were still frowned upon and illegal in many US states in the 1960s, when their story started. However, their love won out.
One year before interracial marriage became lawful nationwide, on June 1, 1966, they tied the knot. Given that such weddings were illegal in 31 states as late as 1960, it was an audacious and brave undertaking.
Georg Stanford Brown followed a different route before becoming well-known in Hollywood. At the age of seven, he relocated from Havana to Harlem. After a while, he made his home in Los Angeles, where he studied theater arts. At first, Brown believed that pursuing a career in theater would be fun and “easy.”
But he soon warmed up to it, enrolling in New York’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy. His meager pay of $80 a week as a school janitor went toward paying his tuition.
When Tyne Daly was a student at the academy, Brown got to know her for the first time. She would eventually become his wife. Philip Burton, the well-known actor Richard Burton’s tutor, taught both of them. Brown later became well-known for his portrayal of Officer Terry Webster in the hit ABC series “The Rookies,” which aired from 1972 to 1976. His portrayal of Tom Harvey in the ground-breaking television miniseries “Roots” had a significant impact.
However, when Tyne Daly and Brown got married, she was already well-known. Her most famous part was that of Mary Beth Lacey, the armed working mother police officer from the popular sitcom “Cagney and Lacey.”
Throughout their marriage, the couple encountered racial prejudice, but they made the decision to reject it and not let society’s narrow-minded opinions to define them. When they shared their first on-screen interracial kiss in an episode of “The Rookies,” they had to demonstrate their fortitude and tenacity. Despite threats from network censors to take down the sequence, Daly and Brown stood their own. Their everlasting dedication to one other and their ideas was evident in the flawless recording and presentation of the show.
In a 1985 interview, Daly opened out about her views over her union with Brown to the Washington Post. Seeing marriage as nothing more than the joining of “another member of the human race,” she refused to be categorized. Their love and common beliefs served as the foundation of their relationship, not race.
Alisabeth Brown (born December 12, 1967), Kathryne Dora Brown (born February 10, 1971), and Alyxandra Beatris Brown (born October 1, 1985) are the three remarkable girls that Brown and Daly had together. Instead of assigning labels to their child, they decide to embrace their individuality and raise them with an open mind. They listed “human” under race, “yes” under sex, and “citizen of the world” under ethnic origin on the birth certificate of their daughter Alyxandra.
Despite the fact that Brown and Daly’s twenty-four-year marriage ended in divorce, their inspirational love story endures. They disobeyed social norms and prejudice to show that love had no boundaries. Let’s honor their incredible journey and tell their tale of love triumphing over all obstacles.
