I keep forgetting things. Might be a side-effect of... you know... the thing that's killing me slowly. NO, not primetime television programming.
One of the things I didn't properly learn (more's the pity) and now want to and maybe retain for more than a day is black actors I have enjoyed throughout the years. AND forgotten the name of. If I write them down maybe I will remember them longer. For some reason I never forget Don Cheedle or Denzel. And Morgan Freeman narrates my dreams, just in the Mad Scientist from Electric Company's voice.
Moses Gun: Shaft, Heartbreak Ridge
James Earl Jones: OH, YOU KNOW! Conan, Great White Hope, Othello. He played J D Salinger in a baseball movie.
Roscoe Lee Brown: who played Jebediah Knightlinger in the movie, (Moses Gun played him in the TV show)
Richard Roundtree: Shaft, John Shaft, who is a complicated man, that no one understands.
Brock Peters: Kill a Mockingbird, Admiral Cartwright
Samuel Jackson: Matrix and Apocalypse Now
Laurence Fishburne: Pulp Fiction, Avengers
Avery Brooks
[I don't really need to remember the names of these two, but I do have to remind myself how to spell them from time to time. On the off chance I do meet either I hope I have the stones to purposely reverse their name, one for the other. Because it is always hilarious when someone does that. And like I did here.]
Joe Seneca: The Blob, Crossroads
Albert Popwell: Dirty Harry movies. Most all of them.
Hmmm. I notice they are also kinda strong male characters. Do they even give a wimpy role to any of these guys?
Laurence Fishburn was in The Matrix and John Wick, not Pulp Fiction and The Avengers. (That was Sam Jackson again.)
ReplyDeleteCuba Gooding, Jr. - Men of Honor, Outbreak
ReplyDeleteForest Whitaker - The Crying Game, Last King of Scotland, The Butler
Sidney Poitier - Sneakers, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
A Soldier's Story for a fantastic cast of Black actors. Damned good movie too.
ReplyDeleteI love Samuel Jackson in Blackish
ReplyDeleteAnd Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder
ReplyDeleteI live in Michigan, and James Earl Jones has a sort of history with my family. My dad worked for over 35 years with J.E.Jones uncle Tom in a foundry, here in a small city called Muskegon. Tom lived north in a very small town called Dublin, Michigan.
ReplyDeleteOn a couple of occasions, my mom and dad, along with my oldest two siblings met James Earl up while visiting Tom and Bessie.
In Tom's later years, he spent a very short time in a nursing home, and the home tried to get his wife, Bessie to sign the family home over to them. Tom and Bessie were very frugal and had more than enough money to pay for his care, the home was just trying to pull one over on what they saw as a dumb black woman. My dad drove up there and read them the riot act, threatening to get the government involved, and the relented. Tom passed away after less than one month.
I found it to be just horrible that a private place would do something like that to a black family. Of course, this was around 20 years ago, or so. Still it was pure BS.