Harry Belafonte “died laughing.”
The singer, actor and civil rights leader passed away from congestive heart failure last year at 96, and his daughter Shari Belafonte is opening up about how they laughed together the last time she saw him, People magazine reported.
When Shari last saw Harry, she said he was sitting “reclined” in his wheelchair with his wife, Pamela Frank, by his side.
“He said, ‘Pam.’ She said, ‘What up, babe?’ He said, ‘Sit me upright.’ So she went over to start sitting him up,” Shari recalled. “And he has a caregiver, so the caregiver said, ‘I’ll get it, Mr. B.'”
“So they kept trying to prop him up. He kept going, ‘Higher, higher, higher,’ to the point where he was all the way up. He was bent over. And he said, ‘Higher,'” she continued. “And I said, ‘Harry, if you were any higher, you’d be sucking on your own.'” And he went, ‘What did you say?’ And we started laughing, and that was it.”
The “Morning Show” actress said she told her late father she loved him, and that was the last conversation they had before his death.
Paying tribute to her father’s legacy, Shari said, “There’s a lot of icons out there, but Harry pretty much beats the band when it comes to people of color.”
Shari previously shared that her relationship with her father — whom she mostly referred to as “Harry” — got “so much better” later in life.
She asserted that the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer “was not the warm and fuzzy father figure depicted in early TV shows,” adding that her grandmother and mother, Marguerite Belafonte, raised her since her parents separated before her birth and she did not grow up with Harry inside the home.
At the 2024 SAG Awards in February, Shari told People that there “were no huge tears” or regrets when her father died, adding that he “lived a very fulfilled life with helping everybody else.”
“We knew that he had completed his journey on this planet, and each one of his children had something to bring, hopefully, as part of his legacy in different areas,” she said per People. “Mine is making people aware of health education.”
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