White actors cast as black people passing as white

Jeanne Crain

The star was best known for her girl-next-door roles in “State Fair” and “Margie” when she was cast as an African American woman from the South who passed for white while studying in the North in 1949’s “Pinky.”

Mel Ferrer

The actor made his film debut in the 1949 drama “Lost Boundaries” playing a physician who decides to pass for white after he is denied jobs when he applies as a black man.

Susan Kohner

Kohner, the daughter of Mexican actress Lupita Tovar and Austrian-Hungarian agent Paul Kohner, played a light-skinned daughter of a maid in the 1959 melodrama “Imitation of Life.”