Bermudian Earl Cameron can rightfully take his place among the best black actors that Britain has ever produced.
He broke new ground for black British actors with his lead role in the 1951 film Pool of London. And he has won acclaim for his talent and his choice of roles. The films that made Cameron a star were notable for their realistic portrayals of black people and their willingness to tackle racial themes.
Born on Angle Street, Hamilton in 1917, Cameron has lived away from Bermuda since 1939– mostly in the UK, but also in the Solomon Islands for 15 years as a teacher of the Baha’í faith.
He has appeared in nearly 40 films, as well as countless stage plays and television programmes. At the age of 88, he came out of retirement in 2005 to play Zuwanie in director Sydney Pollack’s film, The Interpreter, alongside Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn—and with appearances in director Stephen Frears’ award-winning film The Queen in 2006 and in director Christopher Nolan’s film, Inception (grossing $820 million worldwide) in 2010, he is still going strong.
A life on stage and in films and television came about quite by accident.
A desire to see the world saw Cameron leave Bermuda in 1939 to work on a passenger liner before joining the crew of a merchant ship that sailed between New York and ports in South America. The ship was off South America when the Second World War broke out, and the ship was ordered home to the UK for war purposes.
Stranded in the UK—he had left Bermuda without a passport—Cameron worked as a dishwasher before finding work aboard an Egyptian ship that was heading to India. It left on August 8, 1940, his 23rd birthday, without a convoy, or even a gun until one was fitted in Calcutta.
When the ship returned to the UK after five months, Cameron said London felt like home to him—and so he stayed. He found work as a kitchen porter at the Strand Corner House in London.
One night in 1942, he watched a friend, Henry Crossman, who was appearing in the play, Chu Chin Chow, at the Palace Theatre. He took up the story while being feted at London’s National Film Theatre in 2002.
“Henry gave me some tickets to the show and I went,” he recalled. “Afterwards, I went backstage and I said, ‘Hell, I can do what you guys are doing. Can’t you get me in the show?’ Just to get away from these menial jobs, I was quite happy to do almost anything. He said, ‘No, the show is already cast, Earl’ and I said, ‘Well, fair enough’.
“Then maybe a couple of weeks later, Henry came to me and said ‘Earl, your big chance has come. Russell didn’t turn up. It’s the third time he has missed’. So Robert Atkins, who was directing the show, said, ‘Find me someone else’. Henry took me over to see Robert Atkins. He looked me up and down and said, ‘Yeah, Henry, I think he’ll do’. So we went up to the dressing room and started to adjust the costumes. Henry told me how to put them on, how I walk in sync with the others, no rehearsal at all.”
Chu Chin Chow became the longest running West End musical at the time of its closing four years later.
Cameron came back to Bermuda briefly in 1946, but quickly returned to England— and soon afterwards, he was cast in West End productions Petrified Forest (his first speaking role), Anna Lucasta and The Respectable Prostitute before he landed the lead role in Deep are the Roots. When the play closed in the West End, it was contracted to more than 60 repertory theatres across the country over a four-year period.
During this period, Cameron took diction lessons from Amanda Ira Aldridge—the daughter of legendary black American actor Ira Aldridge, who built a career in London—and Iris Warren. He credits them with helping him to remove his ‘Bermudian drawl’, making him more attractive to directors.
Cameron’s first film role—and the first lead role in a British film for a black British actor—was to follow soon afterwards; he played Johnny, in the 1951 film, Pool of London, about racial prejudice, romance and a diamond robbery. The film was the first in Britain to show a romantic relationship between a black man and a white woman.
Cameron’s naturalistic style and his reserved, dignified approach were a hit with film directors—and more film roles soon followed. Cameron appeared in There is Another Sun (1951), Emergency Call (1952), The Heart of the Matter (1953), Simba (1955), Safari (1956), The Heart Within (1957) and Sapphire (1959), among others.
Film historian Ann Ogidi, in an essay “Black British Film” for the British Film Institute’s website, wrote that before Cameron’s ground-breaking roles, black actors were often portrayed in British films with Africa as a backdrop, or portrayed a token representation of the black community in Britain. “Then came the cross-cultural films of Earl Cameron’s Pool of London and The Heart Within,” she wrote. “They epitomised the struggle beset by the whimsical and dangerous forces of white prejudice, the law and an impossible dream of being accepted for who he is. By the end of the 1950s, a more explosive representation emerged with Sapphire. Here, an integrated black community in Shepherd’s Bush is taken for granted, but is nevertheless portrayed as unstable and dangerous.”
Cameron was a working actor, appearing in Flame in the Streets (1961) and Guns at Batasi (1964) before a turn as Pinder in the James Bond film, Thunderball (1965). He also appeared in A Warm December (1972), with his friend Sidney Poitier. He continued working in films and television throughout the 1970s before leaving the acting life behind for 15 years, beginning in 1979 when he and his first wife Audrey set out for the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.
“I became a Baha’í in 1963, and it changed my life,” Cameron told the Mid-Ocean News’ Patricia Calnan in 1999 “I found something more important than acting. I had been searching for something for a long time. The universality of it all appealed to me. So, my wife and I became Baha’ís and that was how I went to the Solomon Islands, as a pioneer. I gave up acting completely.”
While in the Solomon Islands, Cameron bought an ice cream business. He operated B-Kool Dairy for 15 years, driving his musical ice cream van to the villages in and around the capital of Honiara, while Audrey ran a café, and then a boutique.
Cameron returned to acting with an appearance on the Lovejoy television series in 1994—and that has been the film industry’s gain, and of immense pride to Bermudians and others who are his fans.
Now married to second wife Barbara—Audrey Cameron died in 1994—Cameron lives in Warwickshire, England, where he continues on the acting path that he so embraced nearly 70 years ago.
Cameron had received many honours during his long and illustrious career, both in the U.K., where he was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 2009 honours list, and in Bermuda. His most recent honour came in November 2012 when the City Hall Theatre was renamed the Earl Cameron Theatre.
