Nadia Cattouse, who has died aged 99, had a distinguished career as a singer and actor that began in groundbreaking productions of the 1950s and continued across several decades.
Her theatre work included Barry Reckord’s Flesh to a Tiger (1958) at the Royal Court, one of the first postwar plays staged in London by a dramatist from the Caribbean; Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1970) at the Round House, which used the framework of a play within a play to expose racism and racial stereotypes, while at the same time exploring black identity; and the Black Theatre Co-operative’s 1983 staging of the African American dramatist Steve Carter’s Nevis Mountain Dew at the Arts Theatre.
