Lola Falana

The Roman refuge and genre cinema

Lola Falana didn't ask permission to join the club of the chosen few. In 1964, Sammy Davis Jr. saw her dancing in a chorus line and decided that this woman from Philadelphia belonged on Broadway. That marked the start of Golden Boy and the end of her anonymity on the streets of New York.

She was the most profitable bet in American entertainment.

In the late sixties she left for Italy, where skin color didn't dictate the size of a role in the script. She shot three films in a short time and became a local pop celebrity (she even recorded records in Italian). But her return to the United States is what truly shook the foundations of the film industry.

In 1970, she starred in The Liberation of L.B. Jones, and critics took notice of her for the first time as a serious actress. Although film seemed like her natural destiny, the Nevada stages had other plans for her bank account.

One hundred thousand dollars a week

Las Vegas soon crowned her the Queen of the city. In the mid-seventies she signed a contract with the Sands hotel guaranteeing her 100,000 dollars a week for her live shows. That figure was an impenetrable wall for any other woman in show business at the time.

Nobody was paying for that back then.

She did it by combining dance, humor and a vocal power that sold out tickets every night. Her presence on television was constant, through shows like The Joey Bishop Show or her own specials funded by the ABC network. But the pressure of keeping up that pace of work began to take a toll on her physical health.

By 1979, the specialized press was already calling her the most complete artist of her generation. Falana didn't just sing; she also designed part of the choreography and oversaw the technical staging of her performances at luxury hotels.

The silence of the stage

In 1987, Falana's body said enough. The multiple sclerosis diagnosis hit her suddenly, robbing her of mobility on the left side of her body and part of her vision. That event abruptly halted a career that had known no rest for two decades.

She spent a year and a half praying and recovering at a country house.

In 1989 she returned to Las Vegas for one last show at the Sands hotel, but she was no longer the same person. That night she decided her life belonged to religion and founded the ministry The Lambs of God of Ministry. Her retirement was not a marketing strategy but a real and definitive withdrawal from the Hollywood spotlight.

In 1996, she moved permanently to a residential area of Las Vegas to live with complete discretion. Her last notable public appearance was a brief encounter with the press in 2011 at a local charity event. The ministry she founded still operates under administrative registration in the state of Nevada, under entity number C1149-1990.