Hey, guess what? Another person from movies has died, so if we could give Al Haig his well earned rest, perhaps we could give a tip of the hat to
Cy Grant, an actor and musician who was from the West Indies, but served in the RAF during WWII, became a barrister and an actor, singer and activist in the UK.
Most of us would probably remember him as the purser on a doomed ship in the Joan Collins-Richard Burton movie
Sea Wife (1957) set during the war. He brought some needed zip and credibility to the unlikely but at times very effective tale of a young nun (yes, Joan Collins) who was shipwrecked with the soulful Burton (who falls in love with her, natch, Basil Sydney, as the worst kind of colonial creep, and the quietly compelling
Grant, (seen on the far right in the above picture), who proves an intrepid companion, until he is pushed too far. As you can see from
The Guardian obit below,
Cy Grant was much more than an actor:
Cy Grant obituary: The Singer, actor and writer who was the first black artist to appear regularly on British TV
by Gus John
Cy Grant, who has died aged 90, was among the first set of RAF officers from the West Indies and qualified as a barrister, but such is the allure of television that he will be chiefly remembered as a singer, actor and broadcaster. In 1957, he began to make daily appearances on the BBC's Tonight programme, bringing levity to current affairs by giving a calypso rendition of the news, often using texts written by Bernard Levin. Cy's ability to compose tunes spontaneously and fit the news into verse was highly commended and won him the admiration of viewers nationwide. For the first time, the country was seeing a black face on TV on a regular basis. Nevertheless, Cy gave up the position in 1960, fearing that he would be considered capable of nothing else.
He acted on stage and screen, but was disillusioned with the obstacles that black actors faced in getting parts that matched their abilities. He once told me: "We suffered the indignity of seeing white actors blackening themselves and giving themselves bulbous lips to play black parts, reinforcing the caricature of us as black people, a caricature which casting directors, artistic directors and playwrights themselves refused to allow us to escape."
Cy spent his entire life in Britain combating such marginalisation. He saw this as a redemptive mission, appealing to white Britain to sweep away notions of cultural supremacy. He held a mirror up to British society and painstakingly interpreted it, as he groped towards actively reshaping it and striving to humanise it.
Born in Beterverwagting, a village in British Guiana (now Guyana), after the end of the first world war, Cy had two brothers and four sisters. His mother was a talented pianist and he grew up surrounded by music, playing the guitar and singing folk songs. He excelled at school and was keen to study law, but his parents lacked the funds.
After working as a civil servant, Cy left for Britain and joined the RAF in 1941, one of roughly 400 men recruited from the Caribbean after the huge losses in the Battle of Britain. He trained as a navigator and in 1943 was shot down in the Battle of the Ruhr, landing in Holland. Joost Klootwijk, the young son of a Dutch farmer, looked on as his parents tried to help the airman. The boy was moved by the novelty of a uniformed black RAF officer crash-landing near his home. The Gestapo identified Cy as "a member of the Royal Air Force of indeterminate race" and he was held as a prisoner of war for two years. Cy later used that phrase for the title of his book about his war service. Klootwijk's subsequent research enabled his son, Hans, to write a book about Cy's crew, Lancaster W4827: Failed to Return.
Although he qualified as a barrister in 1950, he struggled to get work. In his own words, "this was Britain in peacetime and I was no longer useful". He became a recognisable voice on radio, singing folk songs, and recorded several albums. He also hosted his own TV series, For Members Only, in the mid-50s, interviewing a variety of guests and playing the guitar. In 1956, he appeared in A Man from the Sun, a television drama written by John Elliot about the experience of Caribbean migrants to Britain after the second world war. He voiced a character for Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and also appeared in an episode of The Persuaders, opposite Roger Moore.
Cy successfully auditioned for Laurence Olivier and had stage appearances for Olivier's Festival of Britain company in London and New York. In 1965, he was acclaimed as Othello at the Phoenix theatre, in Leicester. The next year he starred in Cindy Ella with Cleo Laine at the Garrick theatre, in London. He also appeared in the films Shaft in Africa (1973) and At the Earth's Core (1976).
Frustrated with many of the roles he was offered, he determined to take on the theatre establishment on his own terms. In order to launch black artistic talent, in 1973 he founded Drum Arts Centre, in London, with the Zimbabwean actor, John Mapondera, and others, including me. Drum collaborated with Steve Carter of New York's Negro Ensemble Theatre and staged a number of productions, including Bread by Mustapha Matura and The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi.
Two major influences in Cy's life, which helped determine the direction of his artistic expression and his later writing, were the poet, politician, philosopher and architect of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and a Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching. He produced and performed Césaire's epic poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land as a one-man show, touring Britain for more than two years. He was later to say of Césaire: "His revolt against Europe is what worked on me in a subliminal yet positive way. It wasn't just a revolt against racism, colonialism and the excesses of European culture, but a call for a return to our native human values, to recognise that nature is alive and bounteous and that we should not abuse her."
In his book, Blackness and the Dreaming Soul (2007), Cy argued that white society must first discover new ways of seeing itself, in order that it might comprehend and value the "otherness" of its indigenous black citizens. In his essay The Way of the West (2008), he argued that the black man, having reclaimed his authentic history and recovered his lost soul, must not fall into the trap of aspiring to assimilate into the so-called civilised values of his former oppressors.
Criticising the notion of Black History Month, Cy argued: "Before we decide upon a calendar of socially relevant events, we would do well to look again at who and what we are and begin to know, like Césaire, that 'the tree of our hands is for all'."
In his last years, Cy wrote copiously and did everything with a new urgency, especially after he became ill. He particularly wanted to see his war memoirs, essays and poems form part of the curriculums in schools and universities.
He is survived by his wife, Dorith, whom he married in 1956, their two daughters and one son; a son from an earlier marriage; and his sister, Valerie.
Kurt Barling writes: In 2008, I persuaded Cy Grant to return to the village in the Netherlands where he had landed during the war to make a documentary. He recalled the desperate efforts to evacuate his plane when it crashed on Dutch soil, and the absurdity of thinking he could escape to Spain. A black man in occupied Europe had no means of disguise.
When Cy finally met Joost Klootwijk during filming, Joost was overcome with emotion at being in the presence of a man he had pictured in his mind as a real-life hero since he was a boy. Cy was humbled by the esteem in which RAF aircrew are held by the Dutch and regretted that they had not been recognised in this way at home. Cy and Hans, Joost's son, soon began to compile a permanent online archive of Caribbean aircrew in the RAF. It occupied much of the last 18 months of Cy's life.
One of the curious by-products of Cy's RAF experience was the 1960s marionette TV series, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. The creator of the series, Gerry Anderson, had lost his own brother over the Netherlands in the second world war, and he drew on Cy's personal qualities to develop one of the first positive black fictional characters in children's television. These were the qualities deemed necessary by Anderson to defeat the Mysterons in 2068. Cy's melliflous tones gave Lieutenant Green, the black defender of Planet Earth alongside Captain Scarlet, a serene and heroic quality. Cy looked back on that series, essentially an allegory of the battle between good and evil, with great fondness. Ever the practical man, he recently told me that Green had kept him well fed into retirement.
• Cy Grant, actor, singer and writer, born 8 November 1919; died 13 February 2010