Pinky

Pinky is a 1949 American drama film directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay was adapted by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols based on Cid Ricketts Sumner's 1946 novel Quality. It stars Jeanne Crain as the title character, a young light-skinned black woman who passes for white. It also stars Ethel Barrymore, Ethel Waters and William Lundigan. Pinky was released in the United States on September 29, 1949 by 20th Century-Fox. It generated considerable controversy because of its subject of race relations and the casting of Crain to play a black woman. It was nonetheless a critical and commercial success, and earned Crain, Barrymore and Waters Academy Award nominations. Plot Pinky Johnson returns to the South to visit Dicey, the illiterate black laundress grandmother who raised her. Pinky confesses to Dicey that she passed for white while studying to be a nurse in the North. She had also fallen in love with a white man, Dr. Thomas Adams, who knows nothing about her black heritage.