FILMS
9:41 AM PDT 7/4/2020
by
Rhett bartlett
After starring in the 1951 thriller ‘Pool of London’, he appeared in ‘Sapphire’, ‘Thunderball’, ‘A Warm December’ and ‘Inception’.
Earl Cameron, the pioneering black actor from Bermuda who starred in the 1951 British film London pool and then appeared in movies Thunderball to Start, has died. He was 102 years old.
Cameron died Friday at his home in Kenilworth, England, his agent said. The Guardian.
Director Basil Dearden portrayed Cameron as a sailor who falls in love with a white girl (Susan Shaw) in the context of racism and crime in London pool. It was the first major role for a black actor in a British film, and the interracial relationship portrayed in the film also made its way.
“I certainly knew that the movies at the time had no black-and-white romantic scenes,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Telegraph.
Dearden revisited interracial relationships at Sapphire (1959), in which Cameron played the brother of the main character, a doctor. And in Call in the streets (1961), directed by Roy Ward Baker, Cameron played a factory worker who would receive a promotion, much to the resentment of his white colleagues.
The courteous Cameron also played a sympathetic doctor during a Kenyan uprising in Simba (1955), a shipmate in Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), a captain at John Guillermin’s Pistols in Batasi (1964), a British Secret Service contact who runs a navigation supply store in the movie 007 Thunderball (1965) and an ambassador in front of Sidney Poitier in A warm December (1973)
In a statement, Cameron’s children said: “Our family has been overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and respect we have received from the news of our father’s death … As an artist and as an actor, he refused to take on roles that degraded or stereotyped the character of people of color. He was truly a man who upheld his moral principles and was inspiring. “
Cameron, the youngest of six children, was born in Bermuda on August 8, 1917. He served in the British Merchant Marine and ended up living in London.
“When I arrive to [the city]I would clearly say, I encountered many slights and prejudices, but it doesn’t bother me. But what bothered me was when I tried to get a job, that was impossible, “she told the British Film Institute in 2016.
While working as a dishwasher, Cameron visited a friend who was in the cast of a musical in the West End and ended up getting a role in the choir, replacing someone who was fired. Finally, he appeared on stage in productions of Deep are the roots and The petrified forest before making his acting debut London pool.
In the 1960s, he portrayed a taxi driver fighting prejudice on the telefilm The dark man and she was a guest star in British series as popular as Doctor who, Dangerous man and The prisoner.
More recently, Cameron played a dictator at Sydney Pollack’s The interpreter (2005) and Queen Elizabeth’s royal painter (Helen Mirren) in The Queen (2006) before making his last film appearance at Christopher Nolan’s Start (2010)
In a statement, Bermuda Prime Minister David Burt offered his condolences to the Cameron family, adding: “At a time when everyone is examining the history of people of color, life and the legacy of Earl Cameron makes us stop and remember how he broke barriers and refused to be confined to what his humble beginnings may have dictated as his path. “
“I never saw myself as a pioneer,” said Cameron near the end of his life. “Only later, looking back, did it occur to me that I was.”
