‘Gone With Wind’ Actress Dies Of Burns

Butterfly McQueen, who played Scarlett O’Hara’s young, scatterbrained slave Prissy in “Gone With The Wind,” died Friday after suffering critical burns when a kerosene heater caught fire. She was 84.

McQueen told firefighters her clothes caught fire when she was trying to light one of two kerosene heaters in her one-bedroom cottage just outside Augusta, Ga.

McQueen’s career spanned Broadway, the movies and television.

But for better or worse, her immortality rested on her small role in the 1939 film that became an enduring phenomenon - by some measures the biggest movie hit ever.

It was a role no black performer could relish - a slave, and a dimwitted one who gets slapped by the heroine.

But few seeing “Gone With The Wind” could forget the half-pathetic, half-comic Prissy, admitting, just as long-suffering Melanie was about to give birth, that she had lied about being a midwife. “Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies!”

“I hated it. The part of Prissy was so backward,” McQueen told an interviewer in 1986.