Mariann Aalda
American television, stage and film actress
Mariann Aalda (born 1948 or 1949) is an American television, stage, film actress, performance artist, and stand-up comic.
Career
Aalda is best known for her work in television as one of the first African-American daytime soap opera heroines, playing DiDi Bannister-Stoner on ABC's The Edge of Night from 1981 until the show's cancellation in 1984. For many years before that she was a writer-performer with the sketch comedy troupe Off Center Theatre in New York, and toured with the Boston-based improv group, The Proposition, along with notable animation voice actor and director, Charlie Adler. Later, she appeared on the CBS show Guiding Light. She also had regular roles on the CBS sitcom The Royal Family, as the daughter of Redd Foxx and Della Reese, and the HBO series 1st & Ten, as the wife of O. J. Simpson's character.
Aalda also achieved notoriety recurring on the CBS sitcom Designing Women, as Anthony's yuppie-from-hell girlfriend, Lita Ford, and on the NBC soap opera Sunset Beach as the tragically disfigured Lena Hart. She co-hosted the lifestyle show Designs for Living on the USA Network and was a reporter for the magazine show NOW! on WNBC in New York. Her numerous guest-star roles are mostly sitcoms.
Aalda has also appeared in movies, co-starring in the urban cult film Class Act as rapper Kid's clueless mom, and as Coach Harrison in Nobody's Perfect.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mariann Aalda” as american television, stage and film actress. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american television, stage and film actress. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5947500. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1949, 1981 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mariann Aalda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.