The penultimate batch of Facebook posts.
Day 15: Juano Hernandez
Born in Puerto Rico, of Puerto Rican and Brazilian heritage, Juano Hernandez took a roundabout route to acting. He worked as a sailor and moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he joined a circus and became an acrobat. After that he became a professional boxer, before working in vaudeville and radio. Some of his earliest film roles came in pioneering African American director Oscar Micheaux’s productions, including 1932’s ‘The Girl from Chicago’.
In 1949, he gave one of his best-remembered performances in ‘Intruder in the Dust’ as Lucas Beauchamp, a Black man living in the South who refuses to defer to his white neighbours and is falsely accused of murder. The film was his first with a major studio, earning him a Golden Globe nomination and helping launch his career in Hollywood as a character actor.
What to watch: ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Day 16: Josephine Baker
A dancer, singer, actress and Jazz Age icon, Josephine Baker was always more beloved in her adopted France than in her American homeland. She grew up in St. Louis and began dancing professionally in her teens. In 1925, a talent scout spotted her dancing at a club in Harlem and invited her to Paris to perform in ‘La Revue Nègre’. She became a star almost overnight and would remain one for nearly five decades, working with the French Resistance during World War II and campaigning for civil rights.
What to watch: ‘Zouzou’
Day 17: Earl Cameron
Earl Cameron was the first Black actor to star in a British film. Born in Bermuda, he began his acting career on the London stage during World War II and started appearing in films as an extra. His breakthrough role came in 1950 when cold-calling a casting director at Ealing Studios won him the part of Johnny, a Jamaican merchant seaman, in ‘Pool of London’. The film was a landmark in British cinema, featuring (albeit tentatively) an interracial relationship between a Black man and a white woman. It was also a box office hit.
Yet despite receiving widespread praise for his performance, Cameron struggled with the lack of opportunities for Black performers in the industry. It would be five years before he appeared in another major part, in 1955’s ‘Simba’.
He worked steadily on TV and in films through the next few decades and retired from acting in 1979, only to return to it in the early 1990s, when he was in his seventies.
He died in 2020 at the age of 102. Actor Paterson Joseph tweeted: “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.”
What to watch: ‘Pool of London’
Day 18: Nina Mae McKinney
Nina Mae McKinney was just 16 years old when director King Vidor chose her to star in ‘Hallelujah’, one of the first all-Black musical films. She dazzled both audiences and Hollywood, receiving rave reviews for her screen debut and a five-year contract at MGM. Yet despite being everything the industry wanted in a star (Vidor once said, “She was beautiful and talented and glowing with personality.”), she found that Hollywood had almost no roles for her. She performed in nightclubs and cafes in the U.S. and across Europe, landing a few film roles here and there, but never had a part as great as her first.
What to watch: ‘Hallelujah’
Day 19: Dooley Wilson
Despite earning a place in cinema history at the piano at Rick’s Café Américain, Dooely Wilson couldn’t play a note. He was actually a drummer—as well as a singer—and began his career in minstrel shows before forming his own band in 1919 and touring with them in Europe. He returned to the U.S. in the early 1930s and began to perform on Broadway. In 1940 he played Little Joe in the original production of ‘Cabin in the Sky’ and Hollywood took notice, casting him in a string of light comedies and musicals.
Then came the part of Sam—Rick’s (Humphrey Bogart) loyal pianist and friend—in ‘Casablanca’, a role Wilson played with warmth and complete sincerity. In a film filled with memorable performances, his still stands out.
‘Casablanca’ won the Oscar for Best Picture and has since become a classic. But it didn’t have much of an impact on Wilson’s career and in his subsequent films, Hollywood gave him very little to do.
What to watch: ‘Casablanca’
Day 20: Nichelle Nichols
A dancer, singer and actress, Nichelle Nichols toured with Duke Ellington and the Lionel Hampton Band and played the lead in a stage production of ‘Carmen Jones’ before landing the role that would change the course of her career: Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in ‘Star Trek’. Serving as a communications officer aboard the ‘USS Enterprise’, Uhura was a Black woman and a member of the ship’s bridge crew—a talented officer who commanded respect.
Yet by the end of the show’s first season, Nichols had grown frustrated with her character’s lack of development and decided to leave. She said as much to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when the two met at a fundraiser, but he urged her to stay, telling her that the show was an important symbol of integration and multiculturalism and that Uhura was a role model for African-American audiences. He was right. Whoopi Goldberg would later say that at the age of nine she switched the television on one day, saw Nichols, and yelled, “Come quick, there’s a Black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!” (Goldberg became a life-long ‘Star Trek’ fan and starred in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’.)
Nichol’s performance as Uhura also inspired astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space and in the 1970s, Nichols worked with NASA to recruit more diverse candidates for the space programme. Jemison began each of her shifts in space with the words “Hailing frequencies open,” a tribute to Uhura.
What to watch: ‘Star Trek’
Day 21: Canada Lee
Multi-talented and restless, Canada Lee grew up in New York City and ran away from home at the age of 14 to become a jockey. By the time he was 19, he’d traded the saddle for the boxing ring and become a professional fighter, winning lightweight and welterweight championships before a head injury prompted him to switch to acting.
He made his stage debut in the late 1930s with the Federal Theater Project in Harlem and played Banquo in Orson Welles’ all-Black production of ‘Macbeth’. But it was his performance as Bigger Thomas in the 1944 stage adaptation of ‘Native Son’ that finally got Hollywood’s attention. He was soon cast as a stevedore in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Lifeboat’, doing his best to suggest changes to his dialogue and make the character less of a stereotype.
He continued to perform on stage and occasionally in films, until his civil rights activism made him a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. His career, and ultimately his life, was cut short by the blacklist—he died of a heart attack at the age of 45.
What to watch: ‘Body and Soul’
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