- - Sammy Davis Jr.'s Friends Celebrate the Barrier-Breaking Entertainer, 100 Years After His Birth: 'A Light You Couldn't Look Away From' (Exclusive)

Scott HuverDecember 8, 2025 at 5:16 PM

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Singer Sammy Davis Jr. -

For what would have been his 100th birthday, PEOPLE spoke to a slew of Sammy Davis Jr.'s former friends and colleagues

“Sammy Davis Jr. was a light you couldn’t look away from,” Morgan Freeman tells PEOPLE

Adds Don Cheadle: "Sammy Davis, Jr., was not only a towering, sui generis talent but also a performer who used his platform and prestige to fight for equality and justice"

A century ago, on Dec. 8, 1925, Sammy Davis, Jr., was born, and the world of show business has never seen anyone like him, before or since.

“Sammy Davis Jr. was a light you couldn’t look away from,” Morgan Freeman, who made one of his earliest film appearances opposite the entertainer in 1966’s A Man Called Adam, tells PEOPLE. “One hundred years later, it still shines.”

Indeed, since his death from throat cancer in 1990 at age 64, Davis left a staggering legacy as a one-of-a-kind talent — he was a multi-hyphenate performer, top-billed in Hollywood films and TV shows, Broadway musicals, vaudeville, albums, nightclubs, Las Vegas spectacles and more. But he's just as well-known for his unforgettable personality. A 5’2” half-Black, half-Puerto Rican man who’d been in the spotlight since he was four years old and had converted to Judaism, Davis was a pillar of the Rat Pack alongside Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. He was a trailblazer, breaking color barriers both professionally and personally, marrying three times, including once to a white woman, which proved controversial during the 1960s Civil Rights era.

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“Sammy Davis, Jr., was not only a towering, sui generis talent but also a performer who used his platform and prestige to fight for equality and justice, setting an example for how to ‘show up’ for the disenfranchised in the most meaningful ways,” says Don Cheadle, who portrayed the legendary artist in the 1998 HBO film The Rat Pack and upholds another aspect of Davis’ legend as a member of the all-cast of the modern Ocean’s Eleven films, which the original 1960 heist caper starring Davis, Sinatra, Martin and their celebrity cronies.

"Getting to play him in The Rat Pack and share a Golden Globe with Gregory Peck as a result of that role (which made my mother VERY happy) is something that will forever be a highlight of my career,” Cheadle told PEOPLE in a statement.

While Davis’ prodigious legacy has not been as celebrated in recent years as those of his close friends Sinatra and Martin, as his centennial arrives he’s slated to be the subject of not one but two high-profile film projects from some of Hollywood’s hottest contemporary talents.

Colman Domingo is directing Scandalous! which tells the tale of Davis’ clandestine 50s-era romance with white actress Kim Novak, who’ll be played by Sydney Sweeney, a liaison so fraught with danger the singer rushed into an arranged marriage in 1958 with a Black woman (Loray White) to avoid potentially fatal consequences. The couple never lived together and got a divorce that same year.

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Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop performing.

Meanwhile, actor, singer, dancer and Hamilton standout Leslie Odom, Jr. will write and star in a film telling of Davis’ eyebrow-raising 1970s friendship with the Church of Satan founder Anton LaVay.

“Sammy is the blueprint and gold standard. Sammy is the bar. I suppose he always will be,” Odom tells PEOPLE. “Sammy was gifted. He was given a double portion of talent at the starting gate, and then he spent a lifetime cultivating it. He’d been in front of paying audiences since he was four years old, so by the time he starts making noise in the business as a young man, he was decades ahead of his peers in training and experience. Michael Jackson had a similar trajectory.”

Odom says he’s especially intrigued by the opportunity to delve into Davis’ darker impulses. “I had to understand what would drive the greatest entertainer of all time—a beacon of light—toward the dark,” he says. “Sammy wasn’t a large dude, but he cast an enormous shadow. I’m gonna spend some time in his darkness. The shadow is its own proof of light.”

And it’s that light that lingers in the minds and hearts of the people who were close to Davis during his lifetime. “I knew Sammy from a very young age,” singer-songwriter Paul Anka recalled to PEOPLE. “He was obviously the talent even among all of us – whether it was Dean or Frank, he was the most talented. Frank really respected him and they were very close, but he was a very open, big-hearted human being. He was full of energy all the time. His heart was open to anything that you had to talk to him about as a friend. And he was so focused as a human being toward his talent.”

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Anka, 84, who crafted hit songs like “My Way” for Sinatra and many other performers, remembers Davis “prodding” the songwriter to pen a song for him to record.

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Sammy and Barbra Streisand

As they collaborated, Anka marveled at the fact that, after growing up on stage without a formal education, Davis was an astute creative partner. “He never read music at all, but his tenacious kind of work ethic, once he got something, it was just amazing,” said Anka, who followed his usual instinct to find inspiration in a singer’s life and persona. “The song that I wrote – called ‘I'm Not Anyone,’ which I do on stage [today] as a tribute to him with him on film – it was easy because I knew from his kind of intellectual vibe with me as to what he always went through, but the words came easy and the melody came easy, so it was not unlike Sinatra where I was motivated by him. It was the same kind of experience that I had, writing-wise.”

“He had an amazing personality,” remembers Anka. “Most people wear a mask, a lot of people in our business wear that mask. He would take his off. He was very engaging. He was very big in terms of his expression and sincere…He just wrapped his arms around every moment and lived it.”

And nothing, Anka says, compared to the experience of witnessing Davis perform live on stage. “He was eclectic…compounded itself by the fact that there was no one else around that did it. No one did it like him…We were primarily in smaller rooms, 800 seats, at The Sands, what have you. So you were in this somewhat cozy, intimate setting, watching this large talent as he went into every aspect of what he could do, from the impressions to the drums, to the dancing, to his singing, all of that. You could feel that energy from all of the other factors that were driving him – being Black and all of the persecution that he endured for so many years. It just came out of his performance. And it was magical. It was absolute sheer magic.”

“There never will be another Sammy Davis, Jr.,” Charo, the famed singer, dancer and Flamenco guitarist, tells PEOPLE. She recalled sharing a bill with Davis during an '80s-era performance at Trump Plaza, in which she was supposed to close the show but balked at following one of Davis’ show-stopping performances. “I said ‘Over my dead body! No way!’ We threw a coin and I said ‘Don't even look for the coin!’”

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Sammy Davis Jr.

“If anybody had the luck to see and hear Sammy Davis, Jr., sing ‘Mr. Bojangles,’ you get bumps all over your goose!” she chuckled. “It was bigger than the camera, bigger than any film. They've never captured the energy. This man – same size like me, 5’2 ½ - was so big that there were no camera, nobody, able to catch that magic.”

For those who knew Davis as someone akin to family, memories of him remain glowing with warmth. “Sammy took to the people. He was loyal and faithful and true,” Sinatra’s daughter Tina tells PEOPLE. Through Davis’ deep bond with her father, Tina knew the entertainer since she was a child, part uncle and part older brother due to the decade age-gap between the two men.

“What was attractive about Sammy was really his humor and kindness,” she adds. “He was very sweet. [The Rat Pack’s] personas were not different than they were on stage, though they were a little silly on stage…Dean was himself, Frank was himself, and Sam was himself. You really got to know them through how they sang, what they sang, and how you felt, how they made you feel.”

"When I'd see him in a nightclub somewhere else other than Vegas, and he was on his own at the top of the marquee, which he was for decades, he was a force of nature,” Tina recalls. “He was so good on a theatrical stage, not just performing, but he was a good actor. He was really great, and he did everything with ease, which is really what affects you most.”

She continues: “Sam was a giant talent, giant talent, and he should be more recognized, in my opinion."

“We loved Sammy and he loved my dad, and we would all have a lot of fun together,” recalls Dean Martin’s daughter Deana, who agrees “Sammy should have been more celebrated…Sammy was an incredible, incredible singer.”

Actress Ruta Lee, who appeared in the 1962 film Sergeants 3 opposite Sinatra, Martin, Davis and their fellow Rat Packers Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, recalls her friend as “the wonderful, built-in loving clown for the group the whole time. There was always laughter. I feel sorry for our director trying to wrangle everybody together to shoot a scene. Frank didn't like to shoot scenes many times, but Sammy was just divine.”

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Sammy Davis Jr.

Lee remembers a wild shooting schedule on location in Kanab, Utah, in which the Rat Pack trio were constantly flying to Las Vegas for solo and group shows, with cast and crew routinely following to join the audience.

Davis’ solo performances, she says, were the knockout of the bunch.

“He was like a lit sparkler!” Lee says. “He just exuded energy and tremendous appreciation and love for his audience. Oh my! How nice to see somebody turning cartwheels and doing anything to make an audience happy. And that's what Sammy did.”

Comedian Tom Dreesen, who opened in Las Vegas for Davis for several years prior to his lengthy stint as Sinatra’s opening act, remembers Davis for his ceaseless generosity. “I did Sammy's TV show, Sammy & Company, and I just killed on that show, and Sammy just fell off the couch. He said, ‘I'm going to take you on the road with me.’”

Later, Davis offered Dreesen a slot opening for him in Las Vegas, a huge career break for the comic. As the two arrived at Caesars Palace, they spotted workers adding their names to the marquee – but Davis stopped their limousine to offer new instructions about the size of Dreesen’s name.

“Sammy said, ‘Put Tommy's name up there big so people can see it!’” laughed Dreesen, remembering the workers briefly protesting. “He said, ‘It's my marquee – Put Tommy's name up there big.’… He said to me, ‘Tom, this is your first time in Las Vegas. If I give you this much marquee, then whoever else you work with owes you that until you get your name in full on the marquee, because I set a precedent for you.’”

Going even further to help Dreesen, who in the super club environment risked having his jokes drowned out by rushing waiters and rattling dishes, Davis actually opened the show himself, singing three songs before bringing Dreesen in after the din died down.

“By the time he got done singing, the food and the waiters was out of that room, and then he would introduce me,” the comic recalled. He also worked the generous overture into his opening line. “‘I never dreamed that Sammy Davis, Jr., would be my opening act,’ and I got a big laugh – and Sammy thought it was funny, too!”

“He was just a giving human being that was a man's man in a different kind of a way,” says Anka. “But I respected him a great deal, like many people have, even through his ups and his downs.”

Those downs often were centered around the racial inequality that pervaded Davis’ heyday, where even despite being at the top of the marquee he was, as a Black man, often treated as a second-class citizen.

“We were working days at the Sands and he was staying in the Black hotel in the Black district, and we were offended by that,” says Anka. “And Sinatra put his foot down and he came and he stayed with us at the Sands Hotel.”

Slights came in big and small ways: one of the most painful was in 1960, after Davis, an ardent campaigner in the Black community for John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid, became engaged to the white, Swedish actress May Britt. Kennedy’s father Joseph P. Kennedy forced his dis-invitation to JFK’s Inauguration – something that rankled Davis’ pal Dean Martin.

“My dad said, ‘Well, if you're not going, I'm not going,’’ says Deana Martin. “And Dad did not go because Sammy was uninvited. He was so unhappy that they had done that to my Uncle Sammy.”

Remembers Anka: “He went through so much of that stuff – from his own people, obviously, also,” recalling how many Black audiences viewed Davis’ pioneering successes as a sell-out to white audiences.

“But it was a revenge factor for him to get really what he felt he deserved, and it was sad to see sometimes because he was kind of hurt by it a lot of times, but he overcame it. He overcame it," Anka added.

“It was never easy for him,” agrees Lee.

Offers Dreesen: “He was the Jackie Robinson of show business. He brought down barriers all over the country and took the brunt of that, took the heat of that.”

Dreesen recalls the dramatic aftermath of a seemingly tone-deaf moment in 1972 when Davis had endorsed scandal-ridden President Richard M. Nixon for re-election, earning the ire of many Black voters who virulently opposed Nixon: “Nixon gave him an award and Sammy hugged him, and that picture of him hugging Nixon went on the cover of Jet and the cover of Ebony, and Sammy became persona non grata in the Black community.”

At Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH exposition in Chicago that year, which featured a host of contemporary A-list Black entertainers, the audience was openly hostile when Davis stepped on stage.

“Sammy now stood in the middle of stage while everybody in the audience was booing and jeering, ‘Get off the stage, you Uncle Tom!’” recalls Dreesen. “Backstage, the entertainers had knots in our stomach: the great Sammy Davis, Jr., being booed by his own people.”

Dreesen continues: “Sammy went over and changed the sheet music and he sang one song – he sang, ‘I’ve Gotta Be Me.’"

The song had become one of Davis’ signature anthems, an affirmation of following his own heart and his own code. “At the end of that song, he gets a standing ovation,” says Dreesen. “I've seen a lot of comedians or singers take a tough crowd and get them back in the next 40 minutes or so. I have never seen anyone take a hostile audience and in one song get a standing ovation. That's the greatest single performance I've ever seen in my 56 years in show business.”

“He had a sign hanging in his dressing room that he couldn't pay heed to, but it said, ‘I don't know the meaning of success, but I do know the meaning of failure. It's when I try to make everybody love me,’” says Dreesen. “And he couldn't pay heed to it, because every night he went on stage, he tried desperately to make everybody love him. And he succeeded, time and time again.”

Following his arranged marriage in 1959, Davis married again in 1969 — this time, to Swedish actress Britt. The two divorced in 1968. He married a third time in 1970, to dancer Altovise Gore. He had four children: Tracy Davis (who died in 2020 at age 59) and two adopted sons, Mark and Jeff, with actress Britt; and son Manny Davis, adopted by he and his second wife, Altovise.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”