James Earl Jones: confessions of Big Daddy
http://www.independent.co.uk/stage/2009/nov/23/james-earl-jones-cat-roof
James Earl Jones has been breaking down barriers since the 1950s. As he prepares to star in an all-black Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he tells Maddy Costa about his absent father, elderly sex – and why his stutter was his salvation.
The septuagenarian walking slowly through the Novello theatre in London looks like an archetypal American tourist. Tall and wide, he wears a puffy gilet that makes him seem even bulkier, while a faded baseball cap shades his face. Yet this ordinary-looking man is one of America's pre-eminent actors: James Earl Jones. Over the last 50 years, he has won two Tony awards (playing a boxer in The Great White Hope, and for his role in August Wilson's Fences), an Oscar nomination (for the film of The Great White Hope), as well as multiple Emmy nominations and awards for his TV work.
You wouldn't know any of this to look at him, because what Jones is most famous for is his voice. Deep, rumbling, august: it's the sound Moses might have heard when addressed by God. No wonder George Lucas chose Jones for the fearful voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars.
Jones, who is about to star in Tennessee William's Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, likes to be anonymous. He thinks of himself as a "journeyman actor", quietly muddling along. "Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers. I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'OK, I'll do that.'" He's not too grand to do adverts, either. "I love doing commercials! Usually, they have enough money that they can take time and photograph it well. I'd like to film a British commercial; they're better than American ones."
His stay in London is long enough – Cat is booked until April 2010 – that he may just get the chance. The production transfers from Broadway, where its four-month run was hugely successful with audiences, despite reviews that found it sentimental (the New York Times) and lacking in soul (the New Yorker). There have been some key cast changes: Brick Pollitt, the alcoholic around whom the play revolves, is played here by Adrian Lester, who hasn't been seen on a London stage since his electrifying performance as Henry V at the National in 2003. Jones plays Brick's father, Big Daddy, and while he's aware that the casting switch is having a subtle effect on his performance, he says one thing remains constant: "Big Daddy loves this other human being. It's not like the way I love my own son . . . " He glances warmly at Flynn, his 26-year-old son and assistant. "But I can experience the stage relationship because I have a real son, and that relationship has gone through all kinds of changes and conflicts, but is always enriching."
For Jones, it's the family relationships in Williams's play that count: the fact that this production features a black family, rather than the usual white family, is immaterial. A change of date has been necessary, because when Cat was written, in the 1950s, black people living in the south didn't have the freedom to be as prosperous as the Pollitt family. But apart from that, says Jones, "We're not doing anything to this play that a white family, or a Chinese family, wouldn't do." To argue that Big Daddy is written as a "redneck", a rough and generally rural white southerner, is spurious, as far as Jones is concerned. "I am a redneck, too. I am a Mississippi farm person. I can be foul-mouthed, I can be inarticulate. It's just that my neck doesn't get red. I've always felt that I understood Big Daddy more than the average northern-American Caucasian actor." The New Yorker agreed, relishing the way Jones relaxed into Williams's poetic language.
Britain's black actors now enjoy bigger, better parts. Still they go unrecognised. Is media racism to blame?
Only a few years ago, black British actors knew what to expect when they were offered parts on television or in the movies: a marginal role or, if their luck was in, the opportunity to reinforce a stereotype, perhaps as a gangster or a drug-dealer.
Now, though, that is all changing. Black actors are regulars on hit TV shows and some are beginning to make it through to Bafta and even Oscar nominations. Nominations for the black Baftas are announced today.
Just last week, the BBC said its first black family sitcom, The Crouches, would be broadcast next month. Lorraine Heggessey, controller of BBC1, hailed the innovation, saying: "This vibrant comedy will showcase the talent of some of Britain's best black actors and introduce new faces to a mainstream audience."
Perhaps, but precedent suggests that putting a mainstream audience in front of talent does not translate into wider recognition not, at any rate, if the talent is black.
Charles Thompson, the organiser of the black Baftas officially the Screen Nation Film and Television Awards, backed by The Independent says the reason why black actors are not better known is obvious: "Mainstream actors are recognised because they are consistently used in publicity to promote the film and television shows they are in. All black actors want is the same shot at publicity as the other actors in the show."
That lack of recognition has prompted an unprecedented attack by some leading black actors on what they regard as the prejudiced culture of Britain's showbusiness media, from chat shows and breakfast television programmes to celebrity magazines, tabloids and broadsheet arts pages.
Kwame Kwei-Armah, best known for his role as a paramedic in the BBC drama Casualty, said black actors were being starved of publicity. "There are problems with the marketing of black actors in this country. What makes you into a media celebrity is being on the front covers of magazines and being on breakfast television," he said. "People in publicity try but find it very hard to sell the black members of the cast they are not seen as sexy or newsworthy, whereas the blonde members of the cast they will run with."
Take the case of Marianne Jean-Baptiste. When she was nominated for an Oscar, the Londoner was supposed to change forever the working landscape of Britain's black actors and actresses.
The biggest black British male star was easily Lenny Henry (43 per cent), with the only other people mentioned being the newsreader Trevor McDonald, EastEnders actor Rudolph Walker and comedian Richard Blackwood.
Not one of 200 people questioned was able to identify a photograph of Chiwetel Ejiofor, star of the Bafta-nominated film Dirty Pretty Things. Only 7 per cent could name Colin Salmon, who played M's chief of staff Charles Robinson in the last three Bond films and who has been tipped by Pierce Brosnan to become the next 007.
Sources involved in the ceremony said that expected support of £30,000 from the 10 leading British broadcasters evaporated to a paltry £3,000. Mr Thompson said he was particularly surprised at the apparent lack of interest in Salmon, who was in Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day. "He's attractive and articulate. You'd think he would be used more in publicity but he's not."
Kwei-Armah said that although some broadcasters were showing programmes that cast black actors in challenging roles, that was not the case with ITV. He said he believed that ITV executives thought black actors did not suit its audiences. "I would say we all live in the same country at the same time," he said. Publicists confirmed they found it very hard to promote black actors. One publicist, who has represented black actors for 10 years, said: "It's not down to the efforts of the publicists but the narrow-mindedness of some of the people out there. They just say a person is not well known enough or they have got enough features at the moment."
Johnson, who has the starring role in a new black feature film, Emotional Backgammon, said he had become so frustrated at the lack of interest in his career by the showbusiness media that he had laid off his publicist.Some of the programmes that have been the most bold in creating roles for black actors have been axed because of low audiences, despite winning critical acclaim. Johnson said that the BBC's decision to drop Babyfather had been "a massive blow to the black community".
None the less, today's black Bafta nominations acknowledge Ejiofor's achievement in Dirty Pretty Things by placing him on the shortlist for best achievement in film (male). The actor, who will shortly star in a BBC adaptation of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale", is also nominated in a separate category for television drama.
Black actors in protest over Bafta awards
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/black-actors-in-protest-over-bafta-awards-1305763.html
Leon Herbert, who starred in Alien III, Scandal and The Paradise Club, will lead a demonstration against the absence of black actors from nominations for the Bafta awards tomorrow night.
The protest, coinciding with the awards ceremony, has the support of Jesse Jackson, the black civil rights activist. The actress Vanessa Redgrave is set to attend with her Oscar.
Other black actors joining the demonstration include Gordon Warnecke, the Asian star of My Beautiful Launderette, Steve Toussaint, of the ITV customs drama The Knock and Danny John-Jules, of the BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf.
In the 27 years since the Bafta awards have been televised only a handful of awards have gone to black actors.
Mr Herbert said he was angry with directors and film-makers who were members of the academy yet refused to cast black actors in leading roles. "We are part of society yet we are not being given the opportunity to be part of the media."
Although he had enjoyed some success in Hollywood films, Mr Herbert said that each time he was typecast as a villain and had only been on screen for a matter of minutes.
"After I got famous in Aliens III, no one called me any more. That is what the industry does. When blacks get successful they drop them and get another young kid along," he said yesterday. "That is why there are no famous black actors and why they never get to the stage of a Bafta nomination."
Mr Herbert, who says lack of work led to him setting up a television production company, added: "The industry won't give black people leading roles unless they are blowing someone's head off. There's a big piece of cake and it's enough for everybody. All we're asking for is a slice of the cake - because we're starving."
A Bafta spokeswoman said it was impossible to find many black actors in leading roles over the past year. "This is a problem for the industry, not the academy," she added.
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