Leslie Uggams (born May 25, 1943) is an American actress and singer. She is known for her work in the 1967 broadway musical Hallelujah, Baby! for which she won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and a Theatre World Award (1967); as Kizzy Reynolds in the 1977 television miniseries Roots. Uggams was born in New York City. Her father was a singer with the Hall Johnson choir and her mother was a dancer. She attended the Professional Children's School of New York and Juilliard. She met her husband, Grahame Pratt while she was performing in Sydney; they married in 1965. After their wedding, the couple decided to reside in New York, in part to avoid Australia's racial segregation laws of that time.
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