The SAG-AFTRA Basis kicked off Black Historical past Month by launching the fourth season of its Legacy Assortment, a collection of greater than 200 never-before-seen profession retrospective interviews.
This season focuses on trailblazing Black movie and TV actors — starting with the late Invoice Walker, whose profession spanned almost 50 years and greater than 100 movies and TV reveals, together with “The Killers,” “The Lengthy Scorching Summer time” and “Our Man Flint.” Keep in mind Reverend Sykes, who urges Scout a.ok.a. Jean Louise to “rise up, your father’s passin’” as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom close to the top of “To Kill a Mockingbird”? That’s Walker in motion.
The veteran actor, who additionally served on the board of administrators of the Display screen Actors Guild from 1952 to 1971 (solely the third Black particular person to take action), was interviewed about his life and profession simply seven weeks earlier than he died in January 1992. Then 95 years previous, Walker candidly recounts his journey from small city Indiana (the place he was the one Black scholar to graduate from an all-white highschool) to performing on Hollywood’s silver screens and combating for higher illustration for Black actors.
Within the hour-long interview, Walker discusses his profession highlights — together with engaged on 1950’s “Vivid Leaf” with Gary Cooper, who Walker known as “the best man I ever shook arms with” — and lowlights — just like the time he was accused of being a Communist at a SAG board assembly.
Walker additionally shared phrases of knowledge from his grandmother, who had been a slave, which he discovered to dwell by. “There’s concern and greed and all that on the market, however don’t you go round on the planet together with your fist all balled up, as a result of then can’t no goodness get in,” Walker’s grandmother, who had been a slave, advised him when he graduated highschool. “That’s the message I’d like to depart with the world: ‘Unball your fists,’” he stated.
Starting within the late Nineteen Forties, Selection lined Walker’s profession, with early mentions in solid listings and for motion pictures like “No Means Out” (with Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis) and “The Harlem Globetrotters” (with Dorothy Dandridge). His first headline point out got here in 1952, when he landed a featured function in “Mississippi Gambler.”
Walker’s obituary was printed within the Jan. 28 version of Each day Selection and included was a recounting of the occasions of Could 7, 1953, when he delivered a speech to urging Hollywood producers to rent extra Black actors and to extra pretty signify Black individuals on display screen.
With fellow SAG board member Ronald Reagan at his facet, Walker spoke on behalf of the union who had “determined it was time to cease speaking and to behave to appropriate sure circumstances” and advocated for “rapid motion” on the matter, particularly that Black actors be “solid in a greater variety of roles than the same old butler and maid function allotted them, together with ‘non-specifically Negro roles,’” that they be solid in all crowd and background scenes and, lastly, the “correct portrayal of the function of Negroes in American historical past.”
On the assembly, Walker advised producers: “No particular person, no race, can stroll alone efficiently. Don’t take away the roles the Negro now has in footage. However give him extra job alternatives in order that we might be a part of with you within the march towards higher footage, extra sincere footage and larger field workplace.”
Because the obituary notes (and the SAG-AFTRA Basis dialog affirms), Walker waged his struggle for inclusion and equity for the remainder of his life.
The Black Historical past Month-timed season of the Legacy Assortment is a six-week collection consisting of 12 episodes, launched on the SAG-AFTRA Basis’s YouTube channel each Monday and Thursday. Interviews with Walker, Janet MacLachlan and James Avery are presently out there, with Phylicia Rashad’s interview set to debut on Thurs. Feb. 6.
The remaining interviews shall be launched as follows:
Mon., Feb. 10: Eriq La Salle (filmed 5/8/2003)
Thurs., Feb. 13: Derek Luke (filmed 11/27/2006)
Mon., Feb. 17: Andre Braugher (filmed 1/15/2002)
Thurs., Feb. 20: Lorraine Toussaint (filmed 12/16/2012)
Mon., Feb. 24: Djimon Hounsou (filmed 1/8/2004)
Thurs., Feb. 27: Sophie Okonedo (filmed 1/12/2005)
Mon., Mar. 3: Blair Underwood (filmed 6/3/2008)
Thurs., Mar. 6: Mario & Melvin Van Peebles (filmed 4/7/2004)
The Legacy Assortment launched in 2024 as an growth on the SAG-AFTRA Basis’s ongoing “Conversations” collection, which options in-depth discussions and profession retrospectives with acclaimed actors. This system dates again greater than 40 years when the inaugural episode with actor Henry Fonda was recorded (on Dec. 15, 1979), however lots of these talks had been unavailable till final yr.
“Ten years in the past, we embarked upon a significant venture to protect, digitize and again up this assortment, which for 35 years prior, had been recorded on quite a lot of completely different codecs,”. “So, in 2014, we began the method of digitizing these older conversations,” Rochelle Rose, SAG-AFTRA Basis’s nationwide director of performers applications, advised Selection’s Jenelle Riley on the launch. “To cite Helen Mirren, ‘It’s solely right here [at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation] that you’ve a real historical past of performing — it’s by way of these conversations.’”
The primary season, “Emmy Winners,” featured episodes with Robert Duvall, Viola Davis, Henry Winkler, Jessica Walter, Peter Dinklage, Doris Roberts, S. Epatha Merkerson, William Shatner, Edie Falco, Edward James Olmos, Jean Good and Alfre Woodard.
The second season, “Icons,” included conversations with traditional Hollywood legends like Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, Charlton Heston, Ernest Borgnine, Ralph Bellamy, Rod Steiger, Dennis Hopper, Kathleen Freeman, Norman Lloyd, Tippi Hedren, Farrah Fawcett, Jane Russell and David Carradine.
The third season, “Oscar Winners,” featured Fonda, Forest Whitaker, Rita Moreno, Shirley MacLaine, Marlee Matlin, Michael Caine, Kathy Bates, Cliff Robertson, Mary Steenburgen, Ben Kingsley, Ellen Burstyn and Christopher Walken.
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