Marlene Warfield, Actress in ‘Network’ and ‘The Great White Hope,’ Dies at 83

Marlene Warfield, Actress in ‘Network’ and ‘The Great White Hope,’ Dies at 83

Marlene Warfield, the New York actress known for her feisty turns as the prostitute ex-girlfriend of James Earl Jones’ boxer in The Great White Hope on Broadway and the big screen and as a young revolutionary in Network, has died. She was 83.

Warfield died April 6 of lung cancer at a hospital in Los Angeles, her sister, Chequita Warfield, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Warfield also recurred as Maude’s third and last regular housekeeper, the Jamaica-born Victoria Butterfield, on the sixth and final season (1977-78) of the famed Norman Lear-created CBS sitcom that starred Bea Arthur.

After appearing in the East Village at St. Mark’s Playhouse in French dramatist Jean Genet’s The Blacks — where she understudied for Cicely Tyson and also worked alongside the likes of Jones, Godfrey Cambridge and Maya Angelou — Warfield made it to Broadway in October 1968 when she was cast as Clara in The Great White Hope, written by Howard Sackler.

She received Theatre World and Clarence Derwent prizes for her powerful performance, then accompanied Tony winners Jones and Jane Alexander to Hollywood, where all three reprised their roles in the 1970 film directed by Martin Ritt at 20th Century Fox.

In Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), nominated for best picture, Warfield sparkled in a scene in which her Laureen Hobbs, an Angela Davis type, meets with Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen, a UBS executive who wants to do a weekly series revolving around the Ecumenical Liberation Army.

After Diana introduces herself as a “racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles,” Hobbs introduces herself as “a bad-ass Commie nigger.”

The second of the three kids, Marlene Ronetta Warfield was born in Queens on June 19, 1941, and raised in Brooklyn. His father, Sidney, sold tokens for the New York City Transit Authority, and her mother, Ruth, was a homemaker.

Warfield took tap, ballet and acrobatic lessons as a kid, and while attending the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan did summer stock, appearing in a 1957 production of Take a Giant Step in the Catskills.

Later, she studied opera at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and acting at the American Institute of Theater and TV Arts.

She replaced Thelma Oliver in The Blacks in 1962 and worked onstage in A Matter of Life and Death, Elektra, Volpone, Who’s Got His Own and The Taming of the Shrew at Lincoln Center before landing on The Great White Hope.

Around this time, she also was showing up on such TV shows as The Nurses, The Defenders, For the People and Dave Garroway’s Wide Wide World and doing commercials for Fab detergent.

Represented by pioneering Black talent agent Ernestine McClendon, Warfield moved to California in 1977 to join the cast of Maude, on which she made her first appearance late in the fifth season. She succeeded Esther Rolle (as Florida Evans) and Hermione Baddeley (as Nell Naugatuck) as maids in the suburban Findlay household.

Her Victoria Butterfield was “not stupid, she is not uneducated, she’s very ambitious and stands on her own two feet,” Warfield told Jet magazine in August 1977.

Warfield’s résumé also included the films Joe (1970), Across 110th Street (1972) and Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) and guest spots on such TV series as The Name of the Game, Lou Grant, The Jeffersons, Little House on the Prairie, Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, In the House, ER, The West Wing, The Shield, Law & Order and Cold Case.

In 2000, she returned to the stage in Pittsburgh for a starring role in August Wilson’s King Hedley II.

In addition to her sister, survivors include her son, Keith; her grandson, Demetrius; and a cousin, percussionist Vivian Warfield. She was married to William Horsey from 1967 until his 1993 death. Her brother, Earl, died in January 2024.