Earl Cameron
August 8, 1917- July 3, 2020
Pioneering actor

UK media, including The Times of London, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the BBC, along with the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and US trade publications Hollywood Reporter and Variety hailed Cameron’s place in history as the UK’s first black film star.

The British Film Institute’s (BFI) tribute said he “blazed a trail for black performers in Britain”. He was also praised for his refusal to accept roles that were demeaning to black people.

Apprentice

For someone who entered the work world at age 13 as a plumber’s apprentice and fell into acting by accident, Cameron’s own life story had the makings of a movie. After a stint in the Merchant Navy, he landed in wartime London, where he found work as a dishwasher and was back at sea for a time.

A bit part in a musical was the spark that sent his life in a new direction. After nearly a decade spent honing his skills as an actor, he had his breakout role in the 1951 film Pool of London. The BFI tribute said the part of the Jamaican seaman Johnny “launched him into a career as Britain’s first home-grown, non-American black movie celebrity”.

Interracial

Pool of London was hailed both for Cameron’s performance and for tackling racial themes. It was said to have been the first British film to portray an interracial romance. Cameron never looked back after Pool of London. His career would span 60 years. Throughout the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, he worked consistently, with roles on radio and in television and film.

He took a 15-year hiatus from acting when he moved to the Solomon Islands with his first wife, Audrey, and their five children after converting to the Baha’i faith.  Upon his return to the UK, his career took on a second life and he enjoyed acting roles well into his 90s.

Waiter

Born Earlston Jewitt Cameron, and raised on Princess Street, Hamilton, he was the youngest of six children of Edith and Arthur Cameron. He attended Central School until age 13 when he left to become a plumber’s apprentice. He later became a hotel bellman and waiter.

An adventurous spirit had him setting his sights beyond Bermuda. At age 19, he signed on with the cruise ship Monarch of Bermuda, a sister ship to the Queen of Bermuda. A year later, he transferred to the Eastern Prince. He worked as a steward on that ship, which sailed to ports in South America.

Dishwasher

With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the ship was rerouted to London and the crew discharged. Cameron got a taste of the West End and “the fascinating dives in Soho” and decided to stay put.  Finding a job and housing was difficult because London was not welcoming to blacks, he later recalled.

He eventually found lodging and work as a hotel dishwasher, but following a near-death bout with pneumonia, he decided to return to Bermuda. The lack of a passport, for which he had applied but failed to collect, meant he would not be allowed on a UK ship, either as crew or a passenger.

Calcutta
 
Taken on by an Egyptian ship, he was lucky to survive the ordeal. The ship was “filthy” and the crew quarters “appalling”.  There was no respite from the misery he encountered on shore: the “human suffering” of people in Calcutta and the “degrading treatment of blacks” in Durban, South Africa. Rundown because of bad food and still recovering from pneumonia, he ended up in hospital in India.

Thanks to his own wiles and support from a local doctor, he was able to make the return trip to London on the same ship, but as a passenger. Back in the UK in 1941, his job search went more smoothly and he landed a job as hotel kitchen porter.

“By this time, Churchill had taken over and had got the country on the move and jobs were now available—even for the coloured folk!” he told the Workers Voice in 1988.

Musical

One day, a friend got him a ticket to see a musical Chu Chin Chou. The show had six black cast members. He cockily told his friend he could what they did. Incredibly not long afterwards, a spot opened up. Cameron was interviewed by the director and hired. He was terrified, but being on stage was better than washing dishes. He went on tour with Chu Chin Chou for six months. Next came a speaking part in the play The Petrified Forest.

Passion

He then toured with ENSA, the entertainment wing of the British Armed Forces.  He did another stint with the Merchant Navy and upon returning to the UK in 1944, he went to India with ENSA, performing in a song and dance act.

In 1946, that gig over, he returned home. Five months on the island was enough for him to realise he had outgrown Bermuda and he wanted to pursue a life on the stage. Shortly after returning to London, he was taken on as an understudy in Deep are the Roots, a play set in the US South.

Repertory

Serious about developing his craft, he took acting classes with Amanda Ira Aldridge, a daughter of African-American Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, and others. He acted in a couple of plays in the West End, including Anna Lucasta, but worked mainly in repertory theatre in England, Scotland and Wales, eventually assuming the lead role in Deep are the Roots.

Audition

Then came the role of Johnny in Pool of London, which he got after shaving six years of his age and being called back three times to audition.  He won out over Earle Hyman, who would later have a recurring role on The Cosby Show as Bill Cosby’s father.  Cameron described his breakout role as “fabulous…the amount of fan mail I received was amazing”. A slew of films followed including The Heart of the Matter (1954), Simba (1955) and Sapphire (1959).

Islanders

He continued to work in film and in British television during the 1960s and 1970s. He was Sean Connery’s chauffeur in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. While many of his films were shot on location in England and in film studios, others took him to the Bahamas, Africa and the US.  

In 1973, he appeared in Warm December, a film Sidney Poitier directed and starred in. The two men had struck up a friendship when both auditioned for a role in the 1951 South African film Cry, the Beloved Country.  Bahamian Poitier won the part, but their common ancestry as islanders ensured a lifelong friendship.

Friendship

In 1954, Cameron married actress Audrey Godowski, whom he met during a production of Deep Are the Roots. They had five children.  In 1979, the family moved to the Solomon Islands where Cameron ran an ice cream shop and was a Baha’i missionary. They returned to the UK five weeks before Audrey’s death of breast cancer in 1994.  He remarried Barbara Swainson, a fellow Baha’i whom he had met in Bermuda. Barbara, who was originally from the UK, moved back with him to the UK.

Reviews

Over the years, Cameron returned to Bermuda on a regular basis. Local media reported on his career, with the Bermuda Recorder’s Ira Philip giving him the most extensive coverage. 

In February 1951, during a two-month stay in Bermuda, Cameron directed local actors in an excerpt from the play Anna Lucasta at the Opera House on Victoria Street. He was billed in newspaper ads as a “star of stage, screen & radio”. Cameron returned to the UK a few days before the Pool of London premiere and to glowing reviews.

Racial

However, the movie was not screened in Bermuda until 1954. Even then, the screening was out of the way, at a theatre in Mangrove Bay, Somerset and ads promoting the movie were decidedly low-key.

On November 7, 1952, an anonymous letter writer to the editor of The Royal Gazette, wondered why Bermudians had to go overseas to see a film in which Cameron had been acclaimed “by nearly every film critic in London”. According to the Recorder, when Pool of London was released, one theatre manager had said “point blank” that if the movie had a racial theme it would not be shown on the Island.

Doctor

Several of Cameron’s later movies were shown.  Sapphire, which was voted Outstanding British Film of the Year by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 1960 and featured Cameron in the role of a doctor whose sister had been passing for white, and Killers of Kilimanjaro were screened at two Hamilton theatres over the same period in late 1959 and early 1960.  The Recorder cited that as an indication of social change.

In 1964, Cameron led a protest by black British actors against a decision by the UK’s immigration department to grant a work permit to American actor Ossie Davis to appear in a UK film The Hill, starring Sean Connery. The producer’s response was Davis was the best person for the part.  His role in Thunderball came a year later.  Cameron often spoke of the frustration experienced by black British actors of his day at being overlooked for roles in favour of black Americans.

Disaster

In 1970, Cameron was tapped for the lead role in Othello, which was to be staged as part of a summer arts festival in Bermuda. But the director dropped out. His replacement, Mike Leigh, who would later find fame as the director of Secret and Lies and other acclaimed films, presented The Life of Galileo. The production, which was staged at City Hall, was a disaster.

The play was four hours long and Cameron fumbled his lines. Leigh blamed Cameron for the debacle. Cameron did not disagree. He said he wanted to pull out, but felt obliged to continue. Despite the disappointment for the home audience, it did not affect his film career.

Disappointment

From 1975 to 1977, Cameron was head of the UK and Eire Committee for Festac ‘77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, staged in Lagos, Nigeria. The extravaganza was several years in the planning. In 1975, Cameron expressed disappointment that Bermuda had turned down an invitation to participate.

Character

When Cameron returned to the UK from the Solomon Islands, he resumed his acting career with small parts on radio and television. In 2005, out of the blue, came an offer from director Sydney Pollack to appear in the film The Interpreter. Cameron, then in his late 80s, described the role, which starred Nicole and Sean Penn, as a “very good break.”

He told the Bermuda Sun while he was not on screen for very much, the film revolved around his character, an African dictator. Cameron was given the star treatment and was put up in a swank New York hotel for seven weeks. Parts of the action were shot in the United Nations, the first for a feature film. 

The following year, he had a cameo role as a portrait painter in the film The Queen, which starred Helen Mirren.

Retrospective

In 1999, Cameron received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council. In 2002, journalist Ira Philip, in his ‘Island Notebook’ column in the Mid-Ocean News, said that Cameron had been the subject of a retrospective in the UK that year. Philip felt he was deserving of greater recognition locally and wondered whether the powers that be were waiting until Cameron “passes off the scene”. Soon local honours came rolling in. In 2007, he was honoured by the Bermuda International Film Festival which presented him with its Prospero Award, screened three of his films, including Pool of London.

Reading

In 2012, City Hall Theatre was renamed in his honour.  In 2017, he was honoured by Government’s Department of Community and Cultural Affairs on the occasion of his 100th birthday. On the stage of the theatre that now bore his name, he gave a reading from Othello and was interviewed by veteran journalist Charles Webbe.

UK honours included a CBE in 2009 and a Doctor of Letters from Warwick University in 2013 and a tribute by BFI Southbank when he turned 100.

Remarkable

Cameron did not achieve the superstar status of Sidney Poitier. The BBC obituary said there was a near-miss quality to his career. Yet, for someone who left school with no aspiration of being an actor his accomplishments were remarkable. He shared the stage and screen with acting heavyweights including Laurence Olivier. And he had staying power.

Peacefully

Cameron’s bout with pneumonia during his early years in London had left him with one functioning lung. Incredibly, that did not slow him down. As the Covid-19 pandemic raged in Bermuda, the UK and around the world, he died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire on July 3, 2020.

Tributes

Not long afterwards, tributes poured in from around the world.
A graveside service was held on July 9, 2020. Cameron was survived by his wife Barbara; his five children with wife Audrey, Jane, Simon, Helen, Serena and Philippa; and Quinton Astwood, his eldest son by a relationship with Marjorie Astwood.