The Hollywood Blacklist polarized the entertainment industry in the late ‘40s and 1950s, an extension of the Red Scare paranoia and communist witch hunt that dominated the early years of the Cold War.

The list affected entertainers outside of Hollywood as well as studio writers, producers, musicians, and directors. It made hundreds of professionals ineligible for employment because of their alleged communist or subversive ties.

While Hollywood studios were eager to show their willingness to support the US government and avoid the economic fallout that would ensue if they were caught working with communist ‘subversives’, some of those blacklisted were victims of rumors or suspicions.

Lee Grant

Actress Lee Grant wasn’t even a suspected communist but her husband was so Lee was blacklisted at the age of 24 for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and name names. She was banned from working for more than a decade but made a dramatic comeback winning an Academy Award for Best Actress in Shampoo. Here are nine other entertainers who also found themselves sidelined in the Red Scares that peaked after both WWI and WWII.

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was sailing to England for a movie premiere when he learned he could only return if he agreed to an immigration and naturalization inquiry into his moral and political character. Rather than sail back to the US, Chaplin reportedly sent his wife to dig up the money he’d buried in their garden and sew it into her mink coat to bring back to Europe.

Whether the rumor is true or not, Charlie Chaplin didn’t return to the US until 1972 to collect an honorary Oscar. Instead, he and his wife lived in exile in Switzerland. The FBI had a thick file on Chaplin but a record made on July 5, 1949, said they had no evidence of Chaplin’s espionage activities.
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Orson Welles

The FBI opened a file on director Orson Welles in 1941 and kept it open for 15 years although there's debate about whether he was formally blacklisted or decided to live in self-imposed exile in Europe. The furor followed the release of his classic film Citizen Kane, whose main character grows into a power-hungry manipulative capitalist. Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? points to an FBI report that states: “The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that the film Citizen Kane is nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States [ie, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst].”

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Lena Horne

Lena Horne didn’t join the Communist Party but she was found guilty by association and blacklisted after her name appeared in the Red Channels, a pamphlet issued by a right-wing group in 1950. She spent the next few years touring nightclubs as a cabaret singer after being banned from working on Hollywood films or television. Her crime? She’d joined charitable groups such as the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee without fully understanding their ties to communists. (The group later challenged its communist designation.) 
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Dorothy Parker

Wise-cracking writer Dorothy Parker was arrested at a 1927 political rally in support of Italian anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, who were tried and convicted of murder in the US. The men were believed to be followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist. Parker's arrest ensured she’d carry on fighting for her political belief, including her support for the Screenwriters Guild and the Anti-Nazi League which the FBI considered communist fronts. Although she didn’t join the Communist Party, she was associated with local organizations, earning her a place on the blacklist. 

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Pete Seeger

Seekers singer Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League at the age of 17 and six years later joined the Communist Party USA although he seems to have relinquished his membership in 1949 at the height of the Red Scare in Hollywood. He refused to testify before HUAC and was sentenced to a year in prison but his conviction was overturned. The incident put Seeger’s career on hold for years but it didn’t change his ideology. “I still call myself a communist,” Seeger said in 1995.

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Richard Attenborough

During WWII, actor and director Richard Attenborough served in the Royal Air Force before becoming a star in the hit films Brighton Rock and The Great Escape. Attenborough had joined the British Labor Party in 1945 and admitted having socialist sympathies in the past, however, which concerned the FBI so much so that they reportedly added him to the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s. His career would rebound despite the ban.

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Gypsy Lee Rose

Dancer Gypsy Lee Rose was an intellectual who became politically active and supported Spanish Loyalists during Spain’s Civil War. She also became a fixture at Communist United Front meetings, which led to her being investigated by the House Committee on un-American activities, according to her biographer Karen Abbott. Although her radio program was canceled, she had many other talents, including novel writing, to keep her occupied. Unfortunately, Gypsy Lee Rose survived the blacklist only to die of cancer in 1970 at the age of 59. A year earlier, she was performing for troops in Vietnam. 
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Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, was a Communist Party member summoned to a federal court in the ‘50s and asked to testify about his time as a trustee of the leftist Civil Rights Congress. Hammett pleaded his Fifth Amendment right and refused to name names, finding himself in contempt of court and sentenced to six months in jail. Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations questioned Hammett again, two years later, about communist ties. Again the author refused to cooperate and copies of his books were briefly removed from several state department libraries overseas.

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Paul Robeson

Ol’ Man River singer Paul Robeson was an All-American athlete, lawyer, activist, and star of Show Boat (1936), but it is his Communist sympathies that many people remember. At the height of his career, the US government confiscated Robeson’s passport and blacklisted him. He was a strong voice for labor rights, civil rights, and anti-colonialism who was labeled a psychopath because of his views on the Spanish Civil War, labor, segregation, and other ‘un-American’ issues. He purportedly told a 1949 Paris Peace Conference that black Americans shouldn’t fight against the Soviet Union but some historians say his quotes were flashed around the world before he even spoke.