The Blackbirds

Florence Mills’s was one of the most successful entertainers of the 1920s and was one of the stars of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1926 which opened at the Théâtre-Restaurant des Ambassadeurs. The first night opening was scheduled for 12 a.m., to enable the working show people of Paris to attend. By October, Blackbirds had moved to London’s Pavilion Theatre, where it enjoyed 276 performances. Mills became so popular that she was to London what Josephine Baker was to Paris. Her success was short lived as she died in 1927, after delayed surgery for appendicitis, at the age of just thirty-two.