Rosetta LeNoire was an African American actress singer-dancer who founded the Off-Broadway's AMAS Musical Theatre and championed the idea of nontraditional casting. In her career, Ms. LeNoire knew composer-musician Eubie Blake (who was her teacher), Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (who was her godfather). Miss LeNoire, whose name was originally Rosetta Burton, was born in 1911 in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan. Her paternal grandfather played the organ for five churches in the West Indies, and her father was one of the first black plumbers and electricians licensed by New York State. When she was a child, her mother died of pneumonia at the age of 27 after giving birth to her brother in a Harlem hospital corridor because segregated policies barred her from a room. Rosetta was crippled with rickets, a result of vitamin deprivation, and when she was 7 doctors broke her legs so the bones could grow properly. Mr. Robinson, a member of the Elks Club with her father, volunteered to become godfather of the girl he called Brown Sugar. At 13, when her leg braces came off, she began music lessons with Mr. Blake, who told her to ''look up and be proud of yourself.'' When she was 15, she became a chorus girl with the Time Steppers, Mr. Robinson's troupe. Before her life in the theatre, she was a bookkeeper, a hat designer, a receptionist, a playground instructor and a telephone operator. Study at a government-sponsored Works Progress Administration program at a theater on the Lower East Side led to a role in the all-black version of ''Macbeth,'' which Orson Welles was producing in Harlem. She toured with the production. ''Good lord! He was a delegate from heaven,'' she said of Mr. Welles. ''He was the only one who had faith that blacks could bring the right dignity and sophistication to Shakespeare.'' Later she joined the Robert Earl Jones Theater Group. In addition to acting, she cared for Mr. Jones's infant son, James Earl Jones. She made her Broadway debut in 1939 in ''The Hot Mikado,'' an all-black version of the operetta. She acted in some of the earliest television shows, and once joked that she seemed to play every maid's role on Broadway. Perhaps as a result, she was an early and effective advocate of expanding opportunities for minority performers to act in plays and musicals. In 1989, her friend Colleen Dewhurst, who was then president of Actors' Equity, chose Miss LeNoire as the first recipient of what became the union's annual award for broadening participation in theater. The award was named for her. ''Rosetta created nontraditional casting before the phrase itself was created,'' The New York Beacon, a newspaper with a largely black readership, said in 1997. In 1999, President Clinton lauded her long fight against discrimination as he presented her with the National Medal of the Arts, one of her many honors. ''Rosetta did more than dream of a theater with no color bar -- she actually built one,'' he said. The AMAS Rosetta LeNoire Musical Theatre Academy offered classes to inner-city kids. She worked in television during its experimental days, and later appeared in ''Search for Tomorrow,'' ''The Guiding Light,'' ''Amen'' and ''A World Apart. She played Nell Carter's mother, Mama, on NBC's ''Gimme a Break'' and was Mother Winslow on ABC's ''Family Matters'' for eight years. On March 17, 2002, LeNoire died at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey.

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