DIAHANN Carroll, the first black woman to star in a non-servant lead role, has died. She was 84.

Carroll’s daughter, Susan Kay, confirmed her mother’s death to Associated Press. She said her mother died yesterday in Los Angeles of cancer.

She was perhaps best known for her pioneering work on Julia. Carroll played Julia Baker, a nurse whose husband had been killed in Vietnam, in the groundbreaking situation comedy that aired from 1968 to 1971.

Her subsequent performance as the wealthy and cultured Dominique Deveraux in the 1980s ABC primetime soap opera “Dynasty won her a new legion of fans.

Although she was not the first black woman to star in her own TV show (Ethel Waters played a maid in the 1950s series Beulah), she was the first to star as someone other than a servant. NBC executives were wary about putting Julia on the network during the racial unrest of the 1960s, but it was an immediate hit.

Not shy when it came to confronting racial barriers, Carroll won her Tony portraying a high-fashion American model in Paris, who has a love affair with a white American author in the 1959 Richard Rodgers musical No Strings.

The 1974 film Claudine provided her most memorable role. She played a hard-bitten single mother of six who finds romance in Harlem with a garbage man played by James Earl Jones.

In the 1990s, Carroll widened her fan base playing Whitney Gilbert’s mother, Marion, on A Different World and the new millennium found Carroll appearing on multiple TV shows, including Grey’s Anatomy and Diary of a Single Mom.

Carroll is survived by her daughter and her grandchildren, August and Sydney.