Nell Carter’s life was a study in extremes. She endured personal tragedies and chronic health problems, yet she achieved a level of success that most young singers and actors only dream of. She knew both the pain of addiction and the triumph of successfully kicking her habits. And, while she made great money during her award-winning career, she also knew what it was like to lose everything.

Born Nell Ruth Hardy on September 13, 1948 in Birmingham, Alabama, Carter was a singer from the beginning. She sang in her church choir as a child, and on a local gospel radio show. And she also knew tragedy from the beginning: her father was killed when she was just two years old, electrocuted when stepping on a live power line. Young Nell witnessed the accident.

That wasn’t the end of her early troubles. At 16, she was raped at gunpoint. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Tracey. The teenaged Nell felt too young and scared to raise a child, and Tracey was brought up by her aunt Willie. Willie wasn’t the only sibling who was there for Nell during this devastating time – her brother Bernard was also a voice of support and reason, especially in the face of hurtful comments from their mother.

With the help of her siblings, she was able to get past her troubled childhood and stride into the spotlight. At age 19, she moved from Alabama to New York City, changing her last name to Carter and getting her show-biz start singing in supper clubs. Before long, she broke into stage work, with a role in 1970’s Soon, which also starred Richard Gere and Barry Bostwick. Carter started getting noticed, leading to bigger and better shows and finally her role in Ain’t Misbehavin’ on Broadway.

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The role would win her 1978’s Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical. Her big voice and dynamic performances brought her even more fame. She landed a role in the movieHair, followed by costarring TV roles in Ryan’s Hope and Lobo. And then in 1981 came her biggest project, the role that screams “Nell Carter” to most people: Gimme a Break!

For six years, Carter played Nell Harper, housekeeper to a widowed police chief and his three teen daughters. As a confidante and mother figure to the girls, Carter got to showcase the many facets of her talent – she was warm and loving, sassy and funny; she could do physical comedy; she could handle storylines featuring social issues like racism and mental illness. And, of course, she could sing. In addition to recording the show’s theme song, Carter occasionally got a chance to sing within an episode.

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Gimme a Break! was a hit and Carter received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Yet even as she was achieving her greatest professional success, her personal life was spiraling out of control.

In 1982, Carter married Georg Krynicki. Just 18 months later he left her because of her recently acquired drug habit. Carter had begun experimenting with cocaine while in the cast of Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the experimentation became regular use. She estimated that at the height of her addiction, she was spending $1000 to $2000 or more a day on drugs. She attempted suicide and struggled with her faith. It took several trips to rock bottom – each followed by a stint in rehab – before Carter was able to successfully kick her habit. But she did. In the mid-‘80s, friend Liza Minnelli put her on a plane to rehab clinic Hazelden in Minnesota, where many weeks of therapy finally stuck. Carter remained clean afterward, and she later reflected, “Thank God I got help. God and Liza Minnelli.”

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We continue with Part 2 of  The Halfrican Songstress series with more amazing divas from around the globe.

Long-time publicist, media host and model Yetunde Taiwo recently wrapped up filming a pilot for upcoming tv show Afropolitan Chef. Check out the interview below.

What’s the Afropolitan Chef concept? Who’s behind it?

Yetunde: Afropolitan Chef is a cooking show/concept that explores the eating habits of a truly Cosmopolitan African. A person strongly rooted in Africa with its customs, traditions and beliefs, but influenced by the West and is truly a citizen of the WORLD. It is a hybrid of African inspired meals infused with spices, flavors, techniques from other parts of the world.

What elements of the show should we look out for?

Yetunde: Yes, this was a total surprise. I honestly was working on a cookbook which I started about 2 years ago and was looking forward to launching this spring. I had spoken to a producer friend of mine earlier this year about a pilot and she encouraged me and got me excited about even thinking on this path. Next thing I know, I got a call and before you know it, I was on my way to LA to shoot the pilot for National TV. In the show you should look out for a truly diverse eating habit that ranges from jollof rice to efo to quinoa and salmon. And it all always ends with a lovely diner party. It’s my life on a plate with Cosmopolitan Style.

What percentage of the content will be African?

Yetunde: Since I am seriously influenced by West African meals and I also have a passion for western meals prepared with an Africa flair, I would say 70% of the cooking with be African/African inspired meals, spices/style or techniques.

Who is Yetunde Taiwo? and from what/where do you draw inspiration?

Yetunde: I am an Entrepreneur focused in the Fashion and Entertainment industry. I have been a publicist for over 12 years but I have been cooking since I was 6 years old. I have an intense passion for food and I draw inspiration from colors, shapes and other teachers a.k.a. my mother and my favorite chefs in the world ( Laura Calder, Roger Mooking, Nigella Lawson and Giada De Laurentiis)

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Nairobi — Thousands of people in the Horn of Africa died needlessly last year because of the slow response to early warning signs, Oxfam and Save the Children say in a report.Some 13 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya went hungry last year, with 250,000 in southern Somalia still facing imminent death six months after famine was declared.

“The greatest tragedy is that the world saw this disaster coming but did not prevent it,” the United Nations’ former Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said in the foreword. “That the needless hemorrhage of human lives took place again in the Horn of Africa in 2011, in spite of all our knowledge and all our experience, is an outrage.”

Between 50,000 and 100,000 people died between April and August 2011, more than half of them children under five, according to estimates. “We are talking about thousands of lives that could have been saved, millions of dollars that could have been saved,” Elise Ford, a researcher on the report, told AlertNet. The report identifies three main reasons for the international system’s failure to respond in time:

• a culture of risk aversion – fear of the financial and reputational risks of getting it wrong
• fear of being too interventionist and undermining communities’ own capacities to cope
• drought fatigue – a resignation to high levels of malnutrition

The report, ‘A Dangerous Delay: The cost of late response to early warnings in the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa’, criticizes donors for refusing to provide significant sums of aid until malnutrition rates hit around 40 percent – far beyond the emergency threshold of 15 percent – and the crisis hit the media. “We can no longer allow this grotesque situation to continue; where the world knows an emergency is coming but ignores it until confronted with TV pictures of desperately malnourished children,” said Save the Children’s Chief Executive Justin Forsyth.

EARLY SIGNS OF CRISIS

Sophisticated monitoring of weather forecasts and other factors including food prices and malnutrition rates can now provide advance warning of crises. The report calls for national governments, donors, the United Nations and non-governmental organisations to take action at the earliest signs rather than wait for people to start dying. “If you look at the cost of inaction, both in terms of lives and in monetary terms, we should be paying this ‘insurance’ against the worst effects of drought,” said Ford.

“The costs are so low of actually taking that precaution, but the cost of inaction is so high.” Ford said East Africa had “the Mercedes of warning systems” and that there were signs of an oncoming food crisis as early as August 2010. But the international system did not respond sufficiently until famine was declared in Somalia 11 months later. “Communities and humanitarian field workers were denied the tools and resources necessary to save lives before it was too late,” Egeland said. The international community’s slow response to the 2011 hunger crisis followed the same pattern as that to previous droughts, such as in the Sahel in 2005 and in Kenya in 2005-6 and 2008-9, the report said. “The early warning systems performed, but decision makers chose not to respond,” it added.

Some key recommendations are:

• All actors to develop a system of triggers for responding to early warning signals, with detailed monitoring and emergency plans (who does what when)
• More flexibility in long-term development programs so that they can shift to emergency aid if the situation begins to deteriorate
• Governments to endorse the Charter to End Extreme Hunger – a new initiative whereby signatories commit to invest more in local food production, provide cash to protect the poorest 10 percent from the impact of food crises and respond to early warning signs according to people’s needs, not political concerns

Read more at AlertNet Climate, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s daily news website on the human impacts of climate change.