http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/feb/08/guardianobituaries.film1
Ossie Davis, who has died aged 87, was an actor, activist, director and playwright, who championed change for two generations of black performers on stage and screen, and fought tirelessly for civil rights.
Born Raiford Chatman Davis, in Cogdell, Georgia, he was the oldest of five children of Kince Charles Davis, a railroad builder and herb doctor, and Laura Cooper. The courthouse clerk who filed his birth certificate heard his mother's articulation of the initals "RC" as Ossie, and the name stuck.
He developed a love of Shakespeare in high school and, on graduating, set out to be a playwright; he once said that a Ku Klux Klan threat to shoot his father drove him to write. With a year's savings, and a $10 bill from his mother sewn to his underwear, he hitchhiked in 1935 to Washington DC, where he lived with two aunts and, helped by a scholarship, enrolled at Howard University.
Davis was drafted into the army in 1942, and for much of the second world war worked as a surgical technician in a military hospital in Liberia. His acting debut in 1946 won rave reviews for the title role in Jeb, a returning soldier who faces racism in his search for work. His leading lady was Ruby Dee, and, although the play lasted less than two weeks, it was the start of their professional and personal collaboration, which spanned five decades.
They performed together in Anna Lucasta (1946-47), and in 1948, they took a day off from rehearsals, boarded a bus to New Jersey and married there. The names Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were thereafter always linked; famed actors and activists, they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a joint autobiography, In This Life Together.
They performed together in 11 stage productions, including Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun (1959), and Purlie Victorious (1961), a satire exploring racial stereotypes, which Davis wrote and starred in; it had later incarnations on the screen and as a hit musical.
Among the films he wrote and directed were Cotton Comes To Harlem (1970) and Countdown To Kusini (1976), co-produced with Ruby Dee, the first feature film shot entirely in Africa by African Americans. They starred in many television dramas, including Roots; The Next Generation (1978) and Martin Luther King: The Dream And The Drum (1986).
Davis reached wide audiences through films such as Grumpy Old Men (1993, with Jack Lemmon) and I'm Not Rappaport (1996, with Walter Matthau), and was also seen by a new generation in Spike Lee's films, from Do The Right Thing (1988) to She Hate Me (2004).
Artistically, Davis fought against the stereotypes that limited black roles and misrepresented black culture. Politically, he was a lifelong supporter of union struggles, and committed to social justice everywhere. Financially, he contributed to keeping the doors of many theatres open.
He helped organise the landmark 1963 March on Washington and was its master of ceremonies; in 1965 he delivered a memorable eulogy for Malcolm X (which was reprised in Spike Lee's 1992 film biography).
There has been much sadness at his death and many public tributes have been paid. Broadway theatres dimmed their lights just before curtain-up last Friday to honour him.
He is survived by Ruby Dee, their son and two daughters, and seven grandchildren.
· Ossie Davis (Raiford Chatman Davis), actor, activist, director and playwright, born December 18 1917; died February 4 2005.
The original Shaft was aimed very specifically at a black American audience. But its new remake is a 'crossover' summer movie - a healthy sign of the times, argues Mark Morris.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/jun/25/2
The whole blaxploitation genre has had a vigorous afterlife: parodied in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, sampled and referenced in hundreds of hip hop records and videos, and copiously paid tribute to by Quentin Tarantino. And what actor is going to turn down playing a character who we all know is a 'sex machine with all the chicks'?
But the original Shaft was the product of a very particular moment in American history, and had a social significance that far outweighed its importance in strictly cinematic terms. The new film, starring Samuel L. Jackson, has survived a troubled genesis to rise to the top of the US box-office charts. But the 2000 version of Shaft has a different meaning - and possibly a very different type of audience - from the original.
Shaft came out in 1971, a particularly turbulent time in black American history. The civil rights movement had given black Americans equal legal status at last, which in time would lead to mainstream political representation, a growing middle class and a substantial media presence. However, civil rights had failed to end racism, the Black Panthers were in bloody decline, the decay of the traditional manufacturing base - which hit black Americans hardest - had begun, and there was a heroin crisis in the inner cities.
In that context, films like Shaft meant more than their basic crime narratives would suggest. Blaxploitation movies were born of the same rage that fuelled the civil rights movement, born of a wish to shake things up.
Shaft wasn't the first film in this upsurge. According to how you define it, that was either Ossie Davis's Cotton Comes To Harlem or Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song (both 1970). And it's not the most typical: as blaxploitation films go, it's on the respectable side. John Shaft is a fairly traditional private detective, unlike the pusher and pimp anti-heroes of Superfly or The Mack. And while many of the later films were made by veteran white exploitation hacks, Shaft was directed by the distinguished photographer/writer/musician Gordon Parks (not to be confused with his son, Superfly 's Gordon Parks Jr).
Changing times: 30 years of black cinema1970: The release of Cotton Comes to Harlem and Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song herald the start of the blaxploitation genre.
1971: Shaft is first big-budget blaxploitation film. Isaac Hayes wins Oscar for the music. Shaft's Big Score and Shaft in Africa follow.
1972: Two of America's biggest pop stars provide the soundtracks to Trouble Man (Marvin Gaye) and Superfly (Curtis Mayfield).
1973-74: Pam Grier becomes Blaxploitation's First Lady, starring in Coffy and Foxy Brown.
1976: Blaxploitation genre fades. But ensemble comedy Car Wash attracts black moviegoers.
1982: Eddie Murphy explodes on to the scene in 48 Hours and becomes one of the Eighties' biggest stars.
1986: Spike Lee releases his first film, She's Gotta Have It, emerging as figurehead for African-American cinema.
1989: Denzel Washington wins Oscar for his role in Glory. Do the Right Thing sparks debate with its look at New York racial tensions.
1990: Whoopi Goldberg wins Oscar for Ghost.
1991: Boyz N the Hood inspires a host of gritty films depicting the black urban experience.
1992: The release of Malcolm X.
1994: Hoop Dream, about aspiring basketball players, is a critical hit.
1995: Success of Waiting to Exhale shows there is a large audience for middle-class 'female flicks'.
1997: Jackie Brown is a homage to blaxploitation.
2000: Singleton updates Shaft.
Precious, the story of an obese and abused black teenager, is the year's most reviled as well as praised film in America. But director Lee Daniels is used to trouble, he tells Gaby Wood. He grew up gay on the streets of Philadelphia, after all, and is drawn to the most disturbing truths. That'll be why he's heading to America's Deep South for his next film…
Sidibe – a 26 year-old first-time actress – is the star of Precious. The film is both stunning and difficult, and has been met with awe and fury; it's already, in its first few weeks, the most talked-about movie of the year by a considerable margin. Some have accused its director, Lee Daniels (who produced 2001's Monster's Ball), of propagating negative images of African Americans, and suggested that making a "feelbad" movie about black people in the age of Obama is akin to taking several steps backwards. Armond White, chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, fumed: "Not since The Birth of a Nation [in 1915] has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés… it is a sociological horror show." Others have argued that this is a narrow view, that we're beyond the point where it's The Cosby Show or nothing – or simply that the film should be appreciated for its aesthetic merits. What's more, feelgood people don't always have feelgood experiences. Tyler Perry, who has become one of the most successful African Americans in Hollywood by making movies at the opposite end of the grimness spectrum, signed on as executive producer after Precious was finished, and made it known that he too had been beaten by his father.
Daniels's response to this, offered in a tone of bafflement bordering on hurt, is that "Precious girls" really do exist. "These are people that I know," he says, "This is my family. My movie is the truth. It's absolutely colourless."
Though "I shoulda aborted your muthafuckin' ass!" is a fairly demure sample of the film's dialogue, Daniels brings a gloss of optimism to the general picture, if anything. Push, the novel on which it's based, is in many respects more harsh. Written in 1996 by Ramona Lofton, known as Sapphire, it was widely read by teenage girls in state schools. And as for reality: most girls of Precious's background do not have their babies in a nice clean hospital and stay there for days on end, shooting the breeze with nurses who are really Lenny Kravitz in disguise. Most of them get sent home because they don't have health insurance. Precious, on the other hand, is rescued by teachers and social workers and newfound friends. Daniels's film doesn't just say: Look how bad things are. It says: Look how much less bleak things would be if the system didn't fail us.
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