No slowing down for Earl Cameron, Britain's first black film actor

Oct 8 2010 by Graham Young, Birmingham Post

Graham Young meets Earl Cameron, the first black British star to appear in a British movie. Now 93, he's fresh from working with Leonardo DiCaprio on Inception... and is eager for more

Earlier this year, James Cameron’s Avatar beat his own all-time box office champ Titanic. And namesake David Cameron became Britain’s youngest Prime Minister for almost 200 years.

But while those achievements prove that records are there to be broken, nobody can ever take away Warwickshire-based actor Earl Cameron’s claim to fame.

The youngest of six children, Earl was born on August 8, 1917 in Pembroke, Bermuda.

By the end of the 1940s, he’d become the first British black star to appear in a British film, Pool of London.

Directed by Basil Dearden, the diamond robbery story featured Earl’s black seaman character Johnny chasing a white girl called Pat (Susan Shaw).

Sixty years later, Earl, who now lives in Kenilworth, is still working.

Recent credits include The Interpreter (2005) with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman; The Queen (2006) alongside Oscar-winning Helen Mirren and this year’s critically-acclaimed Leonardo DiCaprio hit, Inception.

A campaign to raise £400,000 towards the cost of a documentary about his life is now under way, led by Midland businessman Ken Meeson.

In a case of life imitating groundbreaking art, Earl married the first of his two white wives four years after making Pool of London.

His 40-year marriage to the late Audrey produced five of his six children, and he has now been married to his second wife Barbara for 16 years.

But Earl’s journey from Britain’s oldest foreign territory includes blood, sweat and tears – some of which are still rolling today.

“I’m very proud to have been a pioneer not only in films after the war but also by being the only black actor at that time having worthwhile parts in the theatre,” he says. During our interview, a tear rolls down Earl’s cheek from his left eye.

He’d arrived in Britain just when the Second World War was beginning in September 1939 and soon he was struggling to make ends meet.

“It was almost impossible for a black person to get a job at that time,” he says.

Earl recalls lying ill in bed with pneumonia and pleurisy in St Pancras Hospital having “thrown in the sponge” thanks to pre-penicillin medication suppressing his appetite.

As he weakened, his bed was moved to a distant corner where a nurse in her early 20s told him she’d have to send a telegram to his widowed mother, Edith, about his death. 

Picturing his mother in tears, Earl found the resolve to eat some unappetising food.

“I ate all of the porridge given to me by a dumpy nurse who was not nice and told her to thank the nurse who’d been on the previous evening,” says Earl, dabbing his wet eye. “She said there was no other nurse. To this day, I don’t know who this nurse was, or if she was an angel. But she saved my life.”

Naturally shy, Earl was the youngest of three boys and three girls and was just five when their father, Arthur, died.

Believing the 20 square miles of Bermuda held few prospects, he joined a merchant navy ship and headed for Britain. Technically he was an illegal 22-year-old having arrived without a passport.

After enduring a protracted search in Liverpool for a suitable foreign vessel, he pretended to be a fireman and joined a steamship called the Rod el Farag and sailed the world before heading back to Britain.

“We dropped anchor off the Mersey, just as the first heavy bombing raid began on Liverpool. 

“I was hoping by some chance to get to Bermuda again. But I ended up in London and when the train was pulling into Euston I thought ‘this feels like home’. I resigned myself to staying there during the Second World War.”

The thing about providence is that nobody is ever sure when it will strike. Working hard in London at several kitchen jobs, Earl bumped into an actor friend from a First World War revival show called Chu Chin Chow (based on Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves). 

Earl joked that he ought to be cast, but Harry Crossman told him he wasn’t in Equity. 

“When one actor fell ill, my big chance had come at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus,” says Earl. 

“Half an hour later I was singing with no voice coming out, my knees trembling and sweat pouring down my face. 

“I was terrible – but I thought ‘this is better than cleaning dishes, I’m now in showbusiness’.”

As a member of ENSA – The Entertainments National Service Association – Earl entertained British troops.

He returned to Bermuda for five months after the war, only to tell his mother he had to leave again. Edith told him “If you have to go, you have to go”.

The chance to star in a show called Deep Are The Roots on a five-stop, pre-West End tour in 1947 was the making of the then 30-year-old Earl.

Watching rehearsals, the director told him: “Your diction is terrible. If you want to work in acting, work on your diction.” 

“I realised I was slurring my words,” says Earl who went on to play the part in more than 60 British repertory theatres.

“I began to work with a delightful old lady called Miss Amanda Aldridge, then pushing 80. 

“I’d had no formal education but she was a speech therapist and drama teacher and I worked with her for three years.”

Aldridge was the daughter of the 19th century’s greatest black-African actor Ira Aldridge.

Despite Aldridge’s best efforts, Earl found himself in “a terrible play as bad as it sounds – 13 Death St, Harlem. 

“Then a girl I knew called from a film company at Ealing Studios to tell me Basil Dearden was making Pool of London.

“He told me I looked too old, so I shaved off my moustache.

“I’d told him I was 26, but when he asked again I admitted to 32 and said it was ‘poetic licence’. Actors have to tell the truth today!

“In one example of typecasting when I wasn’t going to get a part because I was ‘born in Bermuda’, I quickly said I was born in Ghana but had worked in Bermuda and I got it.

“After that I was in Lewis Gilbert’s films Wall of Death and then Emergency Call with Sid James and Jack Warner.”

In 1952-53, the emboldened Earl chanced his luck in Rome, knocking on the office door of legendary director Federico Fellini who told him: ‘I’m sorry I can’t find you a part.”

But after persuading director Duilio Coletti to take a second look at his British movie stills, Earl landed a two-month stay in Italy for a small part in a film called Torpedo Zone, starring future Miss Moneypenny actress Lois Maxwell.