Muriel Burrell Smith, a mezzo-soprano, was born on February 23, 1923, in Harlem, New York City, to Sigourney Burrell Smith and Olive Gilmore Smith. Muriel received an artistic boost at the age of 14 when she appeared on The Major Bowes Amateur Hour, which aired live every Thursday evening from 9 to 10 p.m. on the CBS Radio Theater in New York City.
Smith was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for study in 1939, a private conservatory for some of the world’s most talented young musicians. Smith was the first African American student at Curtis, where there is no tuition for students enrolled. She graduated in the same class as conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1946.
Smith made her Broadway debut in December 1943 as Carmen Jones, an African American cast version of Bizet’s Carmen. Smith performed in the play for 14 months while still a Curtis student.
Smith moved to London, England, in 1949, and starred in the films South Pacific and The King and I. She was best known for her uncredited role as Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ghost singer in Moulin Rouge, a 1952 film biography of painter Toulouse-Lautrec. The Phillips Label released Smith’s single “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” in 1953.
It didn’t chart in the United States, but it peaked at number three in the United Kingdom. In 1954, theater critics in the United Kingdom named her one of the country’s top recitalists and theatrical singers.
She returned to the United States the following year, 1955, where she worked as a dubbing artist for actresses in films. When Smith returned to the United Kingdom a year later to research the opera Carmen at the Royal Opera House in London, she turned down an offer from Samuel Goldwyn to star in a film version of Porgy and Bess, explaining that “it doesn’t do the right thing for my people.”
Smith left the stage in 1957 to join Moral Re-Armament, a project dedicated to establishing a world community based on Christian values.
Smith directed The Crowning Experience, a film about the life of African American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, in 1960. The film, one of the first to feature an equal-cast multiracial cast, was credited with helping to integrate theaters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Smith moved to Richmond, Virginia, fourteen years later, in 1974, to care for her ailing mother, and while there, she taught voice performance pedagogy at Virginia Union University. She also returned to the stage, appearing in several productions, including Equus at Richmond’s Theatre IV on Broad Street in 1984 and the world premiere of Sojourner Truth… Ain’t I a Woman? at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia a year later.
Smith was awarded the National Council of Negro Women’s award for women in the arts in 1985.
Muriel Burrell Smith, an international artist, died of cancer in Richmond, Virginia on September 13, 1985. She was 62 years old.