Vonetta McGee

Movie siren Vonetta McGee was born Lawrence Vonetta McGee in San Francisco, California on January 14, 1945. She was an African-American actress best known for her roles in Blaxploitation era movies in the 1970's. McGee graduated from San Francisco Polytechnic High School in 1962, then enrolled later into San Francisco State University, and became involved in acting groups on campus.

McGee appeared in films such as Hammer, Melinda, Blacula, Shaft in Africa and 1974's Thomasine & Bushrod alongside her then-boyfriend Max Julien. In the action thriller Shaft in Africa (1973), McGee took the role of Aleme, the daughter of an emir, who teaches John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) Ethiopian geography. In the 1975 action thriller The Eiger Sanction, she starred alongside Clint Eastwood. She also appeared in an episode of the TV series Starsky & Hutch named "Black and Blue" in 1979.

McGee was in a live-in relationship with Max Julien during the early-to-mid 1970s. In 1987, McGee married actor Carl Lumbly. They had one child, Brandon, born in 1988. McGee died of cardiac arrest on July 9, 2010, at the age of 65. At the age of 17, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, although her death was not related to the disease.