Hilda Moses was born in Minneapolis on April 15, 1918, the primary of nine children of Creole parents originally from Louisiana. She won a posture award while attending St. Margaret’s Academy in Minneapolis and was well-known by her neighbors for being a wonderful singer. She began college as an English major on the University of Minnesota, where she also studied teaching, but needed to quit as a result of financial concerns. She finished her bachelor’s degree on the Hampton Institute (later renamed Hampton University) while her first husband, Sgt. William Simms, was stationed in Camp Lee, Virginia, during World War II. On the institute, Hilda Simms assisted with a dramatic workshop that inspired her to pursue her own acting profession.
On the age of 25, she moved to Latest York City and joined the American Negro Theater. She helped with sound effects, props, and publicity and landed a job within the play “Three’s a Family.” She also worked jobs performing in radio dramas to achieve more experience.In 1943, Simms’s profession took off when she was solid because the lead in Philip Yordan’s “Anna Lucasta.” The play was a couple of middle-class woman’s fall into prostitution and her struggle to regain respectability and her family’s support. Though it was originally written for a white solid, the American Negro Theater’s adaptation was so popular that the show moved from Harlem to Broadway the next 12 months. It was the primary time that an all-Black solid performed a widely lauded drama that did circuitously address problems with race.
The success of “Anna Lucasta” earned Simms a review in Life Magazine and national fame. (In 2015, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that her mother refused to see the play when it opened because she disapproved of her Catholic daughter playing the role of a prostitute.) The production traveled on to Chicago after which London and ultimately ran for 956 performances. Simms’s acting profession didn’t align along with her husband’s corporate profession, they usually divorced within the early Forties (though she kept his surname as her stage name).While abroad, she married American actor Richard Angarola. The couple returned to america in 1953, when Simms was solid as Marva Trotter Louis within the movie “The Joe Louis Story.” Over the subsequent decade, Simms acted in the tv series “The Nurses” (1962—1964) and performed in other plays, including “The Cool World” (1960) and “Tambourines to Glory” (1963).
Simms grew increasingly frustrated on the limited variety of roles that were available for Black women. People who did exist, Simms often thought, were racist and demeaning. She also told JET magazine that while her fair skin and features kept her from being solid in stereotypical Black roles, her race kept her from playing any white characters.Simms’s outspoken support of civil rights and alleged affiliation with the Communist Party within the early Forties further impeded her profession and placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. In 1955, the Department of Justice denied her passport and canceled her scheduled tour to go to U.S. Armed Forces stationed in Europe. She was not solid for either movie version of “Anna Lucasta.” In 1960, she wrote an article titled, “I’m No Benedict Arnold” for the Pittsburgh Courier and openly discussed these setbacks to her profession.
Simms refocused her attention on political movements and served as creative arts director for the Latest York State Human Rights Commission within the Nineteen Sixties. She went on to get a master’s degree in education from Latest York’s City College and worked for drug treatment programs in Latest York City. She died from pancreatic cancer in 1994 on the age of 75.