Born in Cincinnati, Ohio Gammy Singer spent her formative years skittering across the United States, taking up residence with her family in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas City, Missouri, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Lawton, Oklahoma, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
        During the war years when her father worked as a YMCA/U.S.O. director for the troops in Cheyenne, she and her older brother remember life in a segregated army barrack, living across a dirt road from an Indian Reservation and just down the way from the rodeo. She remembers the famous black entertainers that often had to bunk with her family in army housing because of racial prejudice and "no room at the inn" when they came to Wyoming to entertain at the U.S.O. Club-Earl 'Fatha" Hines, Joe Louis among the many. And she recalls participating in Indian ceremonies, dancing and jumping around with the young Indian children from the reservation, and the drums, headdresses and purses they made for her. And she remembers putting on shows with the kids in the barracks, emulating the shows she had seen at the USO Club where her father often took her. She remembers bad things about Wyoming as well-being chased home from kindergarten with her brother by a group of white kids, learning the word "nigger" for the first time, being aware that the Indians, adults and children alike, had to adhere to a curfew and could not leave their reservation after dark, and being almost run down by a bull when she and her brother tried to sneak into the rodeo on one occasion.
       Life in Pittsburgh was a completely different environment, and it was there that her interest in acting began. She was always picked by her teacher to read aloud to her classmates and hence was selected to audition for a children's television show in the early days of television called Happy's Hour. After four auditions, a producer conundrumed with another, "What are we going to do with the colored kid?" The result was that she was not selected for the show, but it was an experience she always remembered. That no blacks appeared on television anywhere in those days was something she was later to learn. Whether it was a only a career move, or the fact that Little Miss Singer was caught running numbers for folks and ending up in "unseemly places" along wicked Herron Avenue which was near to where the family lived, the family uprooted again and moved across the country to Pasadena, California.
      Stability at last. Gammy went to junior high and high school in Pasadena, and participated in sports, journalism and drama. Prejudice still reared its ugly head, and there was a flurry when she was to be denied a part in a play because of race. The play was Mrs. McThing and it was unheard of to cast a black and a white as sisters. Her father intervened, and she was cast and was a hit. After that, there was no turning back and her path was established.
She went on to college and majored in Drama in the face of the fact that they would be little or no opportunities for her in that field. And racism was a fact of life in the state colleges and universities. Equal opportunity was a joke in the Theatre Departments. She finally ended up at the University of Hawaii where she appeared in EVERY play the school presented until her graduation in 1963, as well as appearing in productions at the Honolulu Community Theatre, and Honolulu Theater for Youth. She dreamed of Broadway, but it was so very far away, physically and as an aspiration.
      She married a Marine, started a theater group at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, built sets, acted and directed there, and her accomplishments were written up in the military newspaper. She had a daughter Laetitia, and while her husband was in Viet Nam, moved to Los Angeles and taught school, and once again tried to follow her dream.
      In the beginning she did tech, then later acted in starring roles at the famous Ebony Showcase run by Nick and Edna Stewart, appeared in several long-running plays, and also taught acting classes there. Later she was to appear in plays all over the Hollywood area, joined Zodiac Theatre Company, directed, acted, designed sets, served on the board and cemented her life-long friendship with her best buddy and co-director of the company, Margaret Avery. Many of the black stars, producers, etc. coming up in Hollywood at that time were members of that company. Gammy was to later start her own theatre company with her partner Henry Sanders, One Flight Up, which fostered and developed original plays by new writers. Welfare and buy the bi and bye were two of the plays that came out of that theater and went on to be produced all over the country.
       In the Blaxploitation era Gammy's skin color worked against her, and the opportunity to appear in films and on television eluded her for a long time, but she continued to master her craft and appeared in many Los Angeles Drama Critics award-winning plays and herself garnered four Dramalogue Awards, was nominated many times for NAACP Image Awards and received the NAACP Theater Award for both acting and directing.
       She divorced, taught school in the Los Angeles area and raised her daughter, all the while maintaining a toehold within the acting community. Television and film work finally came to her even though skin color was always an issue. Her first professional appearance on television was playing a cabbie in the Rockford Files, and she returned to do looping for several more of the Rockford Files shows. In her career she has starred and co-starred, and been featured in episodics, movies of the week, soaps, a series We the People Read, a Universal Television industrial, and starred in the series Up & Coming on PBS for two seasons, the show that was a precursor to the Cosby Show, and the first successful series that featured blacks in a middle-class milieu. She has appeared in films with stars such as Roddy MacDowall, Sidney Poitier, Yvette Mimieux and others and more recently Matthew Conaughey and Chris Rock.
      At age thirty-nine she re-married. At age forty she was again divorced. In the late eighties and early nineties she as a member of the highly acclaimed West Coast Ensemble theatre company and directed, acted, wrote a produced play and was also a member of the Directors Group. She studied and took film classes at Los Angeles Community College, and University of Southern California, as well as scriptwriting classes, and joined the Directors Unit of the Television Academy and trained with professionals. She wrote and performed a one-woman show, Bricktop: Queen of Café Society that toured in the Los Angeles and surrounding areas, and co-authored and directed, Sapphire Speaks: Tales from the Clit with four other actresses-three years before The Vagina Monologues surfaced.
       To supplement her acting career over the many years in this industry, Gammy has variously been a masseuse, a clerical worker, and a teacher. She has taught all levels of school, and has taught the academically gifted as well as the remedial student in many subjects including English, Drama, PE, and Dance. She has taught at-risk students. With two teaching credentials under her belt, she additionally worked as a Studio Teacher, teaching professional children on the set of movies and television. Then when roles for older actresses, and black actresses in particular, dwindled, Gammy made a decision, after being cast in an August Wilson play and finally reaching Broadway, to permanently move to New York for the opportunities that New York seemed to offer. Her decision was sound and the New York community welcomed her. She has been appearing in regional theatre, Off-Broadway, and has done voiceovers, film and television, and is now turning to a new love, writing. She is currently enrolled in a master's degree program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University, has completed her thesis novel and has secured a literary agent. She expects to graduate in January of 2004. At this point in her life, she would be content to have writing as her mainstay, visit her daughter's family in Atlanta and play with the grandkids, maybe direct a bit, and only act in roles that really excite and stimulate her.