Virginia Capers, 78; Singer Was Successful on Stage and Screen

Virginia Capers, who won a Tony award in 1974 for her performance as Lena Younger in the original version of the musical “Raisin,” has died. She was 78.

She had been hospitalized with pneumonia at West Hills Hospital and died Thursday, according to her son, Glenn S. Capers. She had a home in Los Angeles.

Along with roles in Broadway productions including “Jamaica” in 1957 and “Saratoga” in 1959, Capers appeared in a number of feature films and television series. She played Mama Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues,” about blues singer Billie Holiday, and Nurse Florence Sparrow in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” among other roles.

Her television career included several popular series. She was a regular on “Frank’s Place” in 1987 and 1988. She also made guest appearances on “Daniel Boone” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” in the 1960s, “Murder, She Wrote” in the ‘80s and “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” in the early ‘90s. She was nominated for an Emmy award for her performance in an episode of “Mannix” in 1973.

It all came as something of a surprise to Capers, who had trained to be a singer. “My career was an accident,” she said during a 1980 panel discussion organized by Women In Theater in Los Angeles. She had prepared for a career in music and found her first agent by singing for him, whether he wanted to hear her or not.

“He wouldn’t audition me because he didn’t have a piano,” she said in a 1969 interview with The Times. “To show him, I sang ‘Can’t Help Loving That Man’ in the hall outside his office. I gathered an audience.”

He introduced her to popular band leader Abe Lyman, who hired her for his radio program in part, she said, because he needed someone who could speak Yiddish for his Jewish audiences. Capers had learned to speak several languages as part of her musical training.

“I did a lot of radio with Lyman,” Capers told The Times in 1969. “Then Abe took me on some band dates in the Bronx. There stood yours truly. The people who thought I was a nice Jewish girl got the shock of their lives.”

Born in Sumter, S.C., Capers attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and studied voice at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. From the time she was a young woman, she refused to be pigeonholed. “I spent a lot of my life being told I should sing blues because I was black,” she recalled some years ago.

Well into a long and active career, Capers’ love for the stage led her to found Lafayette Players, a Los Angeles-based repertory company featuring black actors and actresses. In 1984, after merging with another theater group, it became Lafayette Players West.

In addition to her son, Capers is survived by her brother, James H. Capers. Services will be held Wednesday at 10 a.m. at the City of Angels Church of Religious Science, 5550 Grosvenor Blvd., Los Angeles 90066. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the church.