A01040 - Earl Cameron, Afro-British Actor Who Appeared in James Bond Movie
Earl Cameron, Barrier-Breaking British Actor, Is Dead at 102
In the 1950s and ’60s, when Black leading men and women were virtually nonexistent on British screens, he became a star. He continued to make movies into his 90s.
Earl Cameron and Susan Shaw in the 1951 movie, “Pool of London.” Their characters had the first interracial romance in a British film.Credit...Alamy
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Earl Cameron, a veteran film, television and theater actor who in the early 1950s became one of Britain’s first Black movie stars, died on July 3 at his home in Warwickshire, England. He was 102.
The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Serena Cameron said.
Mr. Cameron was still appearing in films well into his 80s and 90s, most recently in small parts in “The Queen” (2006) and “Inception” (2010). But his breakout role came more than a half-century earlier, in “Pool of London” (1951), a film noir about a group of sailors on shore leave.
Mr. Cameron had a co-starring role at a time when Black leading men and women were virtually nonexistent on British screens. Just as notable, his character developed a romance with a white woman, played by Susan Shaw. It was the first interracial relationship in British cinema.
For Mr. Cameron, whose wife was white, the role didn’t seem groundbreaking at the time. “I never saw myself as a pioneer,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “It was only later, looking back, that it occurred to me that I was.”
But fellow Black actors in Britain have long regarded Mr. Cameron as a trailblazer and a role model. “They looked up to him because he worked so much,” said Stephen Bourne, author of “Black in the British Frame,” a book about the Black experience in the British film industry, for which Mr. Cameron was interviewed. “He was a benchmark, someone they could aspire to be, because of his long life and career.”
Mr. Cameron was a familiar face in film and on television in Britain throughout the 1950s and ’60s. He co-starred in movies like “Simba” (1955), “Sapphire” (1959) and “Flame in the Streets” (1961), and was seen on TV series like “Danger Man” and “Doctor Who.”
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Mr. Cameron in the 1955 movie “Simba.”Credit...ITV/Shutterstock
He appeared with Sean Connery in the James Bond movie “Thunderball” (1965), playing Bond’s chauffeur. Mr. Cameron had been considered for a bigger role in the earlier Bond film “Dr. No,” but that role instead went to an African-American actor, John Kitzmiller. The experience encapsulated the difficulties Mr. Cameron and his fellow Black actors faced in postwar Britain.
In the British studio system of the time, as in Hollywood, Black actors were often typecast as villains or given subservient roles. Only if the script specifically called for a Black actor would they be hired. Even when they had co-starring roles, as Mr. Cameron did, their names rarely appeared on the posters.
More frustrating to Mr. Cameron was when British studios brought in African-American actors to play roles that might otherwise have gone to him or his peers. The examples are numerous: “To Sir With Love” (Sidney Poitier), “The Hill” (Ossie Davis), “The L-Shaped Room” (Brock Peters). Mr. Cameron lobbied the actors’ union to stop the practice, even as he struck up a close friendship with Mr. Poitier.
“There was a feeling among casting directors that Black British actors couldn’t act,” Mr. Bourne said in a phone interview. “It was a myth. But people like Earl were overlooked. Although their careers didn’t suffer as such because they still worked, their careers didn’t go to another level.”
Indeed, there was a near-miss quality to Mr. Cameron’s film career. Some of that was attributable to the random nature of an actor’s life. But racism certainly played a part in his not becoming a bigger star.
Mr. Cameron spoke of that with frankness, but he did not lament the leading-man career he didn’t have. He fell into acting, as he often said, and put his greatest focus elsewhere, on his family and his Baha’i faith.
“My experiences of theater, television and films have been wonderful. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” Mr. Cameron told Mr. Bourne for his book. “Some things I did well, some things I didn’t. I don’t look at myself as a great actor. Others can judge that. But acting has never been my No. 1 priority in life.”
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In 2009, Mr. Cameron was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.Credit...Anthony Devlin/Getty Images
Earlston Jewitt Cameron was born on Aug. 8, 1917, in Pembroke Parish in Bermuda. He was 5 when his father, Arthur, a stonemason, died. His mother, Edith, took jobs in hotels to support her six children.
In the 1930s, Mr. Cameron joined the British Merchant Navy, sailing to New York and other ports. He arrived in London in 1939 on a ship called the Eastern Prince and remained there during the Blitz. As a Black man from the colonies, he later recalled, he had great difficulty finding a job and ended up working in hotel kitchens as a dishwasher.
One of those hotels was in the West End, London’s theater district, where he befriended jazz musicians and actors. In 1941, he talked his way into a part in the chorus of a musical based on the Ali Baba stories. He was hooked. For the next 35 years he worked consistently, spending a decade in theater before breaking into film and television.
Mr. Cameron gave up acting in 1979 and moved with his family to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, where he ran an ice cream shop called Mr. B-Kool and helped establish a Baha’i community. When his wife, Audrey, died of breast cancer in 1994, he returned to England, remarried and resumed his film career as if he’d never been away.
He gained a plum role as an African dictator in Sydney Pollack’s political thriller “The Interpreter” (2005), which is set at the United Nations in New York. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called Mr. Cameron’s performance “subtle and menacing.” For Mr. Cameron, it was a satisfying turn against type: With an almost serene presence both onscreen and off, he had more often been cast in sympathetic parts.
In 2009, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In addition to his daughter Serena, from his first marriage, Mr. Cameron is survived by his wife, Barbara Cameron; a son from an early relationship, Quinton Astwood; four other children from his first marriage, Jane Sanders, Helen Rutstein, Philippa Cameron and Simon Cameron; 11 grandchildren; 12 great-grandchildren; and four great-great-grandchildren.
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Earl Cameron, pioneering James Bond and 'Doctor Who' actor, dies at 102
The Associated Press
Earl Cameron, who was one of the first Black actors to perform in mainstream British films and played supporting roles to enduring entertainment icons such as James Bond and the title character in "Doctor Who" before appearing in the U.N. thriller "The Interpreter" in his 80s, has died. He was 102.
Cameron died Friday, according to The Royal Gazette, a newspaper in his native Bermuda. The British newspaper The Guardian, quoting the actor's agent, said he died at home in Warwickshire, England.
Cameron stumbled into acting as a way to earn money during World War II and kept at it with repertory theater roles and training from the granddaughter of Ira Aldridge, an American who became a renowned Shakespearean actor in England, according to Cameron's British Film Institute biography.
His break into movies also broke barriers for British cinema. Cameron was cast in one of the starring roles in "Pool of London," a 1951 crime noir movie that was the first British film to feature an interracial relationship. His character, Johnny Lambert, is a merchant seaman who meets a white woman while on shore leave.
Cameron worked steadily making movies throughout the 1950s, sometimes in stereotyped roles such as a witch doctor and a murderous rebel leader in British Kenya, and sometimes in roles designed to confound stereotypes, such as his portrayal of a doctor in "Simba," a 1955 film that also dealt with the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.
He earned his 007 stripes in the fourth James Bond film, "Thunderball," in 1965, playing an intelligence operative in the Bahamas opposite Sean Connery. During the 1950s and 1960s, he supplemented his film work with frequent British TV roles, including two episodes of "Doctor Who" in 1966.
"Unless it was specified that this was a part for a Black actor, they would never consider a Black actor for the part. And they would never consider changing a white part to a Black part," Cameron told The Guardian in a 2017 interview.
"So that was my problem. I got mostly small parts, and that was extremely frustrating – not just for me but for other Black actors. We had a very hard time getting worthwhile roles."
In 1972, Cameron got to work alongside another Bahama-born actor who broke barriers for Black film actors. Sidney Poitier cast Cameron to play the ambassador of an African country in "A Warm December," in which Poitier starred and directed.
Born in Bermuda in 1917 as the youngest of six children, Cameron arrived in England in 1939 after joining the British Merchant Navy. After Britain entered World War II that same year, "it was almost impossible for a Black person to get any kind of job," and he didn't have any qualifications, Cameron would recall.
"Coming from Bermuda in 1939, which was a very racist island, the degree of racism in England didn't surprise me. I had grown up with it," he told The Royal Gazette in a 2018 interview.
Cameron appeared in a number of major Hollywood and British films late in his life, including "The Interpreter" with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (2005); "The Queen" with Helen Mirren (2006) and Christopher Nolan's "Inception" (2010).
Queen Elizabeth II named him a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2009 for his contributions to British entertainment.
"At a time when the whole world is examining the history of people of color, Earl Cameron's life and legacy makes us pause and remember how he broke barriers and refused to be confined to what his humble beginnings may have dictated as his path," David Burt, the premier of Bermuda, told The Royal Gazette late Friday.
Cameron is survived by his wife, Barbara, and his children.
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Earlston Jewitt Cameron, CBE (8 August 1917 – 3 July 2020) was a Bermudian actor who lived and worked in the United Kingdom. Along with Cy Grant, he was one of the first black actors to break the "colour bar" in the United Kingdom.[5] With his appearance in 1951's Pool of London, Cameron became one of the first black actors to take up a starring role in a British film after Paul Robeson, Nina Mae McKinney and Elisabeth Welch in the 1930s.[6][7]
According to Screenonline, "Earl Cameron brought a breath of fresh air to the British film industry's stuffy depictions of race relations. Often cast as a sensitive outsider, Cameron gave his characters a grace and moral authority that often surpassed the films' compromised liberal agendas."[8] He also had appearances in many 1960s British science fiction programmes, including Doctor Who, The Prisoner, and The Andromeda Breakthrough.[9]
Cameron was born in Pembroke, Bermuda,[9] and grew up on Princess Street, Hamilton. His father was a stonemason who died in 1922, after which Cameron's mother took on various jobs to support the family.[10] As a young man, Cameron joined the British Merchant Navy: "I was working on a ship, going from Bermuda to New York and back. I always had a great desire to travel as a kid, and so I transferred to another ship called the Eastern Prince sailing to South America. On our second trip, the war started. ...the British Admiralty sent for the ship, and that brought me to London."[11] In an interview, he summed up what happened next by saying: "I arrived in London on 29 October 1939. I got involved with a young lady and you know the rest. The ship left without me, and the girl walked out too."[11]
Cameron initially faced difficulties as a black person trying to find employment; he was reluctantly taken on as a dishwasher in a hotel and had to accept whatever casual work came his way.[9][11] In 1941, his friend Harry Crossman gave Cameron a ticket to see a revival of Chu Chin Chow at the Palace Theatre. Crossman and five other black actors had bit parts in the West End production. Cameron, who was working at the kitchen of the Strand Corner House at the time, was fed up with menial jobs and asked Crossman if he could get him on the show. He told Cameron that all the parts had been cast, but two or three weeks later, when one of the actors did not show up, Crossman arranged a meeting with the director Robert Atkins, who cast Cameron on the spot.[9] According to Cameron, he had an easier time than other black actors because his Bermudian accent sounded American to British ears (Bermuda, nearest to North Carolina, was settled as an extension of Virginia and retained strong links to Virginia and the Carolinas for the first two centuries of settlement, though it had remained British when they and ten other continental colonies had seceded to form the USA). The following year, he landed a speaking role as Joseph, the chauffeur in the American play The Petrified Forest by Robert E. Sherwood.[9] Cameron commented that when he began working as an actor, he encountered fellow Bermudian Ernest Trimingham still working in the West End.[12][13]
In 1945 and 1946, Cameron took on the role of one of the Dukes in the singing trio the Duchess and Two Dukes, which toured with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) to play to British armed forces personnel in India in 1945, and the Netherlands in 1946. In 1946, Cameron went back to Bermuda for five months but then returned to work as an actor in the UK. He took a job on the London stage as an understudy in the play Deep Are the Roots.[14] Written by Arnaud d'Usseau and James Gow, this play was staged at the Wyndham's Theatre[15] in London for six months (featuring Gordon Heath)[16] and then went on tour. It was during this tour that Cameron first met, and worked alongside, Patrick McGoohan during a production of that play in Coventry. (In 2012, Cameron participated alongside local actors in Bermuda in a reading of Deep Are the Roots, which the Bermuda Sun described as a play "dear to Earl's heart, for it not only gave him his first break in the West End as Britain's first black actor, but he also met his first wife when he travelled on tour with the production.")[15]
He understudied in Deep are the Roots with fellow understudy Ida Shepley, a singer.[17] As Cameron was having problems with his diction, she introduced him to voice coach Amanda Ira Aldridge, the daughter of Ira Aldridge, a black Shakespearian American actor of the 19th century.[18]
Cameron's breakthrough acting role was in Pool of London, a 1951 film directed by Basil Dearden, set in post-war London involving racial prejudice, romance — Cameron's character is a merchant sailor who falls in love with a young white woman, played by Susan Shaw — and a diamond robbery. He won much critical acclaim for his part in the film, which is considered "the first major role for a black actor in a British mainstream film".[19]
Cameron's next major film role was in the 1955 film Simba. In this drama about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Cameron played the role of Peter Karanja, a doctor trying to reconcile his admiration for Western civilisation with his Kikuyu heritage. That same year Cameron played the Mau Mau general Jeroge in Safari.[20]
He told The Guardian in a 2017 interview: "I never saw myself as a pioneer. It was only later, looking back, that it occurred to me that I was."[21] He also found work hard to come by: "Unless it was specified that this was a part for a black actor, they would never consider a black actor for the part. And they would never consider changing a white part to a black part. So that was my problem. I got mostly small parts, and that was extremely frustrating – not just for me but for other black actors. We had a very hard time getting worthwhile roles."[21]
From the 1950s, Cameron gained major parts in many films, including: The Heart Within (1957), in which he played a character Victor Conway in a crime movie again set in the London docklands; and Sapphire (1959) in which he played Dr. Robbins, the brother of a murdered girl; and The Message (1976) – the story of the Prophet Muhammad, where he played the King of Abyssinia.[22]
Cameron's later film appearances include a major role in Sidney Pollack's The Interpreter (2005) as dictator Edmond Zuwanie who is a fictionised version of Robert Mugabe (then leader of Zimbabwe).[21][27] Cameron's performance was praised. The Baltimore Sun wrote: "Earl Cameron is magnificent as the slimy old fraud of a dictator...",[28] and Rolling Stone described his appearance as "subtle and menacing".[29]Philip French in The Observer referred to "that fine Caribbean actor Earl Cameron".[30] He appeared in a cameo as a portrait artist in the 2006 film The Queen (directed by Stephen Frears), alongside Helen Mirren.[31] In 2010 he appeared as "Elderly Bald Man" in the film Inception.[32] In 2013, he appeared as Grandad in the short film Up on the Roof.[33]
Cameron had roles in a wide range of TV shows, but one of his earliest major roles was a starring part in the BBC 1960 TV drama The Dark Man, in which he played a West Indian cab driver in the UK. The show examined the reactions and prejudices he faced in his work. In 1956 he had a smaller part in another BBC drama exploring racism in the workplace, A Man From The Sun, in which he appeared as community leader Joseph Brent, the cast also featuring Errol John, Cy Grant, Colin Douglas and Nadia Cattouse.[34]
Cameron appeared in a range of popular television shows including series Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US) alongside series star Patrick McGoohan.[35] Cameron worked with McGoohan again when he appeared in the TV series The Prisoner as the Haitian supervisor in the episode "The Schizoid Man" (1967).[23]
He also appeared in a many one-off TV dramas, including: Television Playhouse (1957); A World Inside BBC (1962); ITV Play of the Week (two stories – The Gentle Assassin (1962) and I Can Walk Where I Like Can't I? (1964); the BBC's Wind Versus Polygamy (1968); ITV's A Fear of Strangers (1964), in which he played Ramsay, a black saxophonist and small-time criminal who is detained by the police on suspicion of murder and is also racially abused by a Chief Inspector Dyke (played by Stanley Baker); Festival: the Respectful Prostitute (1964); ITV Play of the Week – The Death of Bessie Smith (1965); Theatre 625: The Minister (1965); The Great Kandinsky (1994); and two episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre (Anything You Say in 1969 and Soldier Ants in 1971).
From 1963,[22] Cameron was a practitioner of the Baháʼí Faith,[41] joining the religion at the time of the first Baháʼí World Congress, held at London's Royal Albert Hall.[42] The Baháʼí community held a reception in London in 2007 to honour his 90th birthday.[43] He lived in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England.[44] He was married to Barbara Cameron (née Bower).[45] His first wife, Audrey Cameron (née Godowski), whom he had married in 1954, died in 1994.[6][44] He had six children.[21]
In 2019, the Earl Cameron Award – for "a Bermudian professional who has demonstrated exceptional passion and talent in the field of theatre, cinematography, film or video production" – was established in his honour by the Bermuda Arts Council.[52]
Cameron died peacefully on 3 July 2020, aged 102, at home in Kenilworth surrounded by his wife and family.[20]
His children said in a statement: "Our family have been overwhelmed by the outpourings of love and respect we have received at the news of our father’s passing … As an artist and as an actor he refused to take roles that demeaned or stereotyped the character of people of colour. He was truly a man who stood by his moral principles and was inspirational."[20]
Bermudian PremierDavid Burt paid tribute to Cameron, describing him as an "iconic actor" and "a proud son of Bermuda whose constant, dignified presence added to stage and screen over decades. All Bermuda joins with me in celebrating his long and remarkable life."[53] In the UK, on Twitter, David Harewood described Cameron as a "total legend" and Paterson Joseph wrote: "His generation’s pioneering shoulders are what my generation of actors stand on. No shoulders were broader than this gentleman with the voice of god and the heart of a kindly prince."[20] Historian David Olusoga wrote: "A remarkable and wonderful man. Not just a brilliant actor but a link to a deeper history."[20]
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