Harry Belafonte was married three times and welcomed four 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren before his death on April 25, 2023

Marguerite BelafonteAfro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty

A 1996 profile of the singer in The New Yorker described the former pair as an “odd couple.” Per the outlet, Belafonte and Marguerite came from different social class backgrounds, and as a sorority sister from a middle-class family, it was difficult for Marguerite to understand her husband. She once said, “Our courtship was one long argument over racial issues.”

The pair’s marriage was already in trouble when Belafonte filmed the 1954 movie Carmen Jones, and Belafonte met the woman he would go on to marry next, dancer Julie Robinson, while on set. Marguerite found love letters that Robinson wrote to her husband soon after she gave 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 to Shari, and their divorce quickly followed.

Marguerite had her own career before, during and after her marriage to Belafonte. She acted for a brief period of time, and even had a role as a hostess in the 1959 film Night of the Quarter Moon. Marguerite also studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg, and later told The New Yorker that she and Belafonte were living lives at odds with one another. She said, “I just found the show-biz world to be shallow, and false. And, more and more, that was his whole life.”

Julie RobinsonHulton Archive/Getty

Robinson and Belafonte met when they were both cast in the 1954 film Carmen Jones. Robinson was dating Marlon Brando at the time, but she soon began writing love letters to Belafonte that were discovered by his first wife, Marguerite.

Belafonte attempted to keep his divorce from Marguerite and marriage to Robinson private while filming his 1957 movie Island in the Sun, but the news eventually became public.

As the years went on, Marguerite and Robinson became “good friends,” according to The New Yorker. The outlet added in its 1996 profile, “The 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren of Belafonte’s second marriage, David and Gina, are genuinely close to those of his first.”

Belafonte and Robinson divorced in 2004 after 47 years of marriage, when the humanitarian was 77 years old. In his 2011 memoir My Song: A Memoir, he said of his second marriage, “I felt angry and trapped, but then I’d always felt that way. Trapped by my mother, by poverty … by the responsibility I felt for the global poor.”

Pamela FrankBruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

Though the two kept details of their relationship fairly private over the years, Frank did accompany Belafonte to several events throughout the marriage, including the NAACP Image Awards in 2013 and the opening night of Michael Moore on Broadway in 2017.