Actress. She was the only child of Wallace MacQueen, a stevedore, and Mary MacQueen (maiden name Richardson), who worked as a domestic servant. (Previous reports that her parents were Lonnie and Ella McQueen are incorrect.) The "Butterfly" stage name, which described her constant-moving arms, was actually derived from her dancing in the "Butterfly Ballet" in a 1935 production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." "Butterfly" did become her legal name. She appeared in eighteen films, including "Mildred Pierce," "Huckleberry Finn," and "Gone With the Wind," which may be her most famous part playing a slave named Prissy. She will be remembered for the line, "Lawzy, we got to have a doctor. I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies." When she became frustrated with racial-typecasting, she quit acting in films in 1947. She was a regular on the radio show "Beulah" and then in the TV version of the same from 1950 to 1952; she played the part of a maid. In 1975, at age 64, she received a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from New York City College. The same year, in the stage musical "The Wiz," she was an understudy for the part of Addapearle, the Good Witch of the North. In 1980, after being verbally and physically assaulted by male Greyhound Bus employees in April 1979, she sued and in July 1983, a Superior Court jury in Washington awarded McQueen $60,000; a female senior citizen's ribs were broken as a result of the assault. In 1989 she was honored with a "Freethought Heroine" award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. When she died, she left her personal bank account to that organization as she was a lifelong atheist. At the time of her death, she was living frugally in a one-bedroom cottage with dozens of cats near Augusta, Georgia. She died from third-degree burns over 70% of her body; in critical condition, she told the fireman that her clothes caught on fire from a kerosene heater. Her body was donated to the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta, and her ashes were later buried in Decatur.