Peggy Ann Freeman (August 31, 1945 – May 17, 1979), known professionally as Donyale Luna, was an American model and actress who gained popularity in Western Europe during the late 1960s. Generally cited as "the first Black supermodel", Luna was the first African-American model to appear on the cover of the British edition of Vogue, in March 1966.
She appeared in several underground films such as the screen tests of Andy Warhol (1966), and had roles in Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966). She also appeared in mainstream Hollywood and world cinema most notably, as Enotea in the 1969 Federico Fellini film Fellini Satyricon, as well as Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968) in the role of "'God's Mistress".
Early life
Donyale Luna as she later became known, was born Peggy Ann Freeman in Detroit, Michigan, to working-class parents Nathaniel Freeman and Peggy Freeman (née Hertzog) in 1945. She was one of three daughters, Lillian, Peggy-Ann, and Josephine. Her father had moved to Detroit from Georgia as part of the Great Migration. Her father, of African-American heritage, worked in production at the Ford plant, and her mother, of African-American & German heritage, worked as a secretary for the Young Women's Christian Association and had been given the nickname 'Big Peggy' to differentiate her from Peggy-Ann, who was "Little Peggy". Luna's parents married and divorced on four separate occasions due to their "headstrong characters" and Nathaniel's relatives alcoholism. They lived a "financially stable upbringing in a middle-class neighbourhood of Detroit" on Scotten Avenue. As a child, she would frequently go on trips to local cinemas with her father and in summer to swim at the "Kronk Gym" in Detroit.
As a child, she attended the Detroit High School of Commerce, where she studied data processing and typing. As a teen, she attended Cass Technical High School, where she studied journalism, performing arts and languages and was in the school choir, local community theatre and the experimental Concept East Theater. too increase her pragmatical social prestige or standing.
Exemplified in an advert for a polyester peasant blouse in 1966 for Ebony magazine, the iconography work was said to evoke the black and white images of Man Ray, acknowledging the shift of the early 20th century "visual modernism" morphed into the "disjuncted body" (see Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque and read Negro: An Anthology (1934) by Nancy Cunard, Hugh D. Ford, p. 417), a moving away from the classical Western notion of what a body should be, to one of "distorted corporeal forms" originating in African Arts, Expressionism and Cubism and the body language of Josephine Baker which Luna emulates in the advertisement to create a more "dynamic" image of herself and African-American visual imagery. As a content creator, "Luna's referencing of [Baker and Nefertiti] within the European context signaled her identification with them", as Black women "heroines and tropes" which Luna used as a model to emulate what Black success could be presented as in an environment which responded to both figures to by "primitivizing, sexualizing and ultimately dehumanizing [them in] ... exotic or erotic roles that did not provide occupational transitions to more fulfilling, post spectacle lives".