Word: robeson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fleeting chance, had proved themselves incompetent performers. They lit up the screen - only to be consigned to oblivion. I smile in recollection of the pretty passion that Nina Mae McKinney poured into "Hallelujah," the agitated grace Fredi Washington invested in "Imitation of Life," the power and subtlety of Paul Robeson in "The Emperor Jones." And I curse the absence of all the other sharp or magnificent characters these artists and countless others might have embodied, if only the door had been opened, if only... if only everything had been different...
...Vidor wanted Ethel Waters to play Chick. (Daniel L. Haynes, the baritone who brings a barrel of robust charm to the role of Zeke, was a sort of road-company Robeson.) But Waters - or Honey Brown, whom Vidor fired and replaced with McKinney - couldn't have sold sexuality, with all its lures, all its destructiveness, the way Nina did. Before deserting Zeke for the last time, Chick douses his suspicions of her infidelity by walking toward him and purring, "Let cha baby sit on yo' lap and make ya feel so good." She takes a heavy breath before the word...
...part should have made her a star, and MGM did sign her to a five-year contract, but her only other prominent Hollywood role was as a world-weary hotelkeeper in the 1931 "Safe in Hell." She made three films in Britain, including "Sanders of the River" with Robeson, before returning to a featured part in the Ralph Cooper "Gang Smashers." In the 40s she had one decent Hollywood role, in the passing-for-white drama "Pinky," but mostly she played the one available character for black actresses: maid. She was dead...
...Christophe School of Languages in New York City, young Fredi was dancing with the Happy Honeysuckles when she was 15. She worked as a bookkeeper for W.C. Handy's record company, and was soon appearing with Baker in the musical "Shuffle Along"(1921). She co-starred with Paul Robeson in the Broadway play "Black Boy"(1926) and with Ethel Waters in "Mamba's Daughter...
...wild soul inside the dying swan; few actresses looked more wanly gorgeous than she does in her death scene. Murphy (who cast Fredi's sister Isabelle as the Other Woman in his Bessie Smith short, St. Louis Blues") also chose Fredi to play a prostitute in the Paul Robeson "Emperor Jones," where makeup darkened her skin so viewers would not think Robeson was consorting with a white woman. Washington's role is small and contra-textual: why would Jones leave town for the jungle when Fredi was ready to play...