Word: moores
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...FIRST IMAGE OF THE TRAGEDY of Othello, the Moor of Venice -- the beautiful and delirious Orson Welles movie now spiffed up for its first U.S. engagement in 36 years -- shows Welles in blackface, upside down and dead. Even when he was a young man, a 25-year-old making something called Citizen Kane, the legendary actor-auteur enjoyed imagining himself as a corpse onscreen. It was his impudent prophecy: that he would soon be cast on Hollywood's funeral pyre like a discarded sled...
These performers are British; they were steeped from birth in high style and the seductive melody of theatrical rhetoric. But the leads -- Costner, Mastrantonio, Christian Slater as Will Scarlet, Micheal McShane as Friar Tuck, Morgan Freeman as a Moor displaced in Nottingham -- are all American, intoning flat varieties of American English. They sound like tourists stranded in Sherwood Forest. And they inadvertently give a new meaning to the story: now Robin and his band are vagrant colonials who save England from those who can actually speak the language...
Laurence Olivier OTHELLO. The acting demigod was by no means the first Caucasian to play the Moor of Venice, but this 1965 release proves that he was the finest of them...
...issue, tinged with prejudice and artifice, is as old as theater. In Shakespeare's day, Othello was acted by whites -- and Olivier played the Moor - in blackface in the 1960s. In old Hollywood, where nonwhites were nonstars, Caucasians often played Oriental roles. Marlon Brando kowtowed through The Teahouse of the August Moon; John Wayne did a Genghis Khan job on The Conqueror; no Chinese ever played Charlie Chan. As recently as 1984, Linda Hunt won an Oscar playing a half-Chinese man in The Year of Living Dangerously...
...they are losses that resonate beyond the runway. Says writer Jonathan Moor, the biographer of designer Perry Ellis: "What is different about the fashion industry, compared to theater or film or music, is that the whole thrust of fashion is really under the influence of about ten major people in the world. Their ideas are the ideas that come down the runways at $10,000 a kick, which are within six months translated into something that comes out at J.C. Penney for $100. And those people are at risk...