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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Leslie Uggams, was first considered remarkable for starting her performing career when she was six.

Now she's considered remarkable as one of the actors still active at the age of 82.

She's in an episode of the new season of HBO's The Guilded Age.

She's played Blind Al in the Deadpool films.

In the Oscar-winning 2023 film American Fiction, she played

the mother whose dementia progresses through the film. In the series Empire, she was the mother

of the main character, Lucius Lion. Going back to the beginning, when she was six, she was featured

in a 1950 episode of Bula, the ABC series starring Ethel Waters, as a wise maid in the home of a white family.

Uggams played Bula's niece.

Soon after, Uggam started singing at the Apollo, where she met luminaries like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

She became a regular on the CBS music variety show, Sing Along with Mitch. In

1967, she starred in the Broadway Civil Rights musical, Hallelujah Baby. She won a Tony,

and the show won one for Best Musical. Another achievement, she was the first black woman and

the second black person after Nat Cole to host her own TV variety show.

Leslie Uggams, welcome to you fresh air. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you. Good to be here. So what is it like for you now being remarkable for performing

professionally at such a young age when you was six and now being remarkable because you're in

so many

things at the age of 82.

What's weird about it for me is I never think about that.

I just think, what's my next gig?

...