Posted: Sat 23 Jun 2007 03:31 Post subject: A Part Colored By History: White Actress For Mixed-Race Role
Nearly a year ago I posted an entry to this Popular Culture forum entitled "New Age" Passing? Washington Post Staff Writer Teresa Wiltz interviewed me for an article she was doing on known mixed-race actors who are cast in racially ambiguous roles. (The newspaper never ran that article for some reason.) It seemed that Teresa may have been implying that doing so is a new age version of "passing for white." She referred back to those days sixty to seventy years ago when mixed actors had to either pass or "darken up" and play a black role.
At any rate, Teresa contacted me just two days ago to solicit my comments on a somewhat similar article focusing on what has come to be known as color-blind casting. Specifically, she wanted to know what I thought about Angelina Jolie being cast to play Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel Pearl -- the journalist beheaded by Islamic fascists in Karachi, Pakistan. Below is my email response to Teresa, and below that is her article entitled "A Part Colored By History -- Choice of White Actress For Mixed-Race Role Stirs Debate on Insensitivity."
I don't have a problem with it. If it's okay for mixed-race Halle Berry to be cast as a white school teacher from Nevada (see: "Berry is top candidate to play white Democrat"), or if it's okay to cast mixed-race Wentworth Miller as a racially ambiguous inmate in "Prison Break," why can't Angelina Jolie play the mixed-race Mariane Pearl? I understand that some black groups are opposed to someone white being cast to play a "black" woman, but let's not forget that Mariane Pearl is not black. She's a Dutch, Afro-Cuban mix – at least that's what my research shows.
Ultimately, I believe this is about acting and finding the right person for the role, regardless of color.
Now, could this also be social engineering on the part of Hollywood? Perhaps. If, however, by doing so, the casting directors and the producers can nudge this nation's race-obsessed consciousness toward more of a color-blind consciousness, that's a good thing.
By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 23, 2007; C01
So, let's see. In "A Mighty Heart," we've got Angelina Jolie, American, pale of skin and plump of lip, playing the part of the real-life Mariane Pearl, a French-born, brown-skinned, kinky-curly-haired woman of Afro-Cuban and Dutch heritage. Ponder the societal implications of Jolie sporting a spray tan and a corkscrew wig. Discuss: Is this the latest entry in the American canon of blackface --21st-century style?
Or does Jolie's color-bending turn as the wife of slain journalist Daniel Pearl herald a sea change in our racial consciousness? Is it a signal that, kumbaya, we really are the world, Hollywood truly is colorblind, may the best actress win? Does it matter if a visibly white actress plays a historical figure of (partial) African descent? If so, does it matter that Halle Berry is slated to play a real-life white politician?
Or is it all about the box office?
(Never mind. Of course it's all about the box office.)
In the blogosphere, photos and video clips of Jolie as Pearl serve as a sort of racial Rorschach test. There are those who use the B-word -- blackface -- in decrying Jolie's casting as the height of racial insensitivity.
"It irks me to see [Jolie] in the makeup and the hair," says Lauren Williams, who wrote about the controversy in her blog, Stereohyped.com. "Every fall, you hear about how on some college campus, white kids are having a pimps-and-hos party and painting their faces. People are ignoring that this is a very painful part of America's past."
Wrote another irked spectator on Imdb.com, a movie Web site: "I am screaming my head off about Angelina Jolie playing Mariane Pearl, who is half-black."
But others argue that the Jolie naysayers are practicing reverse racism. Said a contributor on TheZeroBoss.com: "Mariane Pearl is mostly white . . . what are you practicing here, the one drop rule?"
(Jolie, it should be noted, claims some nonwhite ancestry. Her mother was reportedly part Iroquois.)
The debate is cast against the backdrop of the United States' troubled legacy of minstrel shows, where white actors slapped on burnt cork or shoe polish, the better to mock African Americans. Film stars Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Eddie Cantor performed in blackface, as did actors in D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," using greasepaint and murderous stereotypes to reinforce America's worst fears about black men. Even as recently as 1993, actor Ted Danson donned blackface to roast then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg at the Friars Club.
Hollywood didn't confine this phenomenon to its depiction of African Americans. White actors including Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine have donned the brown-, red- and yellow-face, too, playing Native Americans, Latinos and Asians, usually to stereotypical effect. Then consider that Forest Whitaker darkened his skin to play Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland," and the issue gets complicated: Does that count as blackface, or is it akin to Nicole Kidman's donning a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf in "The Hours"? "Ultimately I believe this is about acting and finding the right person for the role, regardless of color," says Charles Michael Byrd, a multiracial rights activist and the author of "The Bhagavad-gita in Black and White: From Mulatto Pride to Krishna Consciousness."
"Could this be social engineering on the part of Hollywood? Perhaps. If, however, by doing so, the casting directors and the producers can nudge this nation's race-obsessed consciousness toward more of a colorblind consciousness, that's a good thing."
But others argue that this country is far from ready for the colorblind approach. There remains a real dearth of roles for women of color.
"This is bigger than Mariane Pearl," says Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "Let's say Queen Latifah had optioned a biopic on Princess Diana. Do we believe we'd ever see Queen Latifah playing Princess Diana? Absolutely not."
For her part, Pearl says it's is a non-issue. "This is the story of a group of individuals," she wrote in an e-mail, "and how they chose to behave as opposed to a group of people seen through the prism of race, color or religion.
"I chose Angie for who she is not what she looks like."
As a European, Pearl may well process race differently than an American woman of a similar mixed-race heritage, who historically in this country would have been deemed "black" and therefore subject to the peculiarities of American-style racism.
In the book upon which the film is based, Pearl writes that Daniel lovingly dubbed her "my mulatta." Of her Cuban-born mother, Marita Van Neyenhoff, she writes: "She was colored, and she had a Chinese grandfather. Clearly there was Spanish and African blood in her, and who knew what else. I felt like history had worked really hard for me to enjoy being a bit of everything." (Her father was Dutch.)
Says "A Mighty Heart" director Michael Winterbottom: "To try and find a French actress who's half-Cuban, quarter-Chinese, half-Dutch who speaks great English and could do that part better -- I mean, if there had been some more choices, I might have thought, 'Why don't we use that person?' . . . I don't think there would have been anyone better."
In the film, the only reference to Pearl's heritage is when she tells someone at a dinner party that her mother was Cuban. (Pearl's mother is played by a red-haired, white-skinned actress.)
In her book, Pearl writes about the racism that she, and particularly her brother Satchi, encountered growing up in Paris. Once, she recalls, Satchi came home bloodied by racists who had mistaken him for North African and hit him on the head with a crowbar. When she and Daniel showed up together for interviews in Pakistan, Pakistanis would stare at them.
"Danny was white," she writes, "I looked a bit like them. Nobody asked me about my origins or religion, but I appreciated once more the advantages of our being a mixed couple."
What a missed opportunity to explore -- or at least acknowledge with visual cues -- those complexities within the context of the movie. Daniel Pearl, after all, was murdered for being who he was: a Jewish American of Israeli and Iraqi Jewish descent. Why not, in telling this story, tell all of it? Images are powerful, possessing the potential to smash stereotypes. And reinforce them.
It will be interesting to see the reaction next year when we'll have the mixed-race Berry in "Class Act," playing the role of Tierney Cahill, a white schoolteacher whose sixth-grade class persuaded her to run for Congress in 2000. Still, we're not likely to see chocolate-hued Angela Bassett playing Hillary Rodham Clinton any time soon.
More often than not, we find whites taking on the roles of heroic people of color, and not the other way around. Consider Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," a retelling of how two Port Authority police officers were trapped under the rubble on 9/11 until they were rescued by Marine Sgt. Jason L. Thomas. Thomas is black; in the film, he is played by a white man. ("If you're going to tell a story, you should try to get it as accurate as possible," Thomas told reporters last year.)
But Hollywood has long been conflicted when it comes to telling the stories of mixed-race people. In 1949, Lena Horne was up for the title role in Elia Kazan's "Pinky," playing a light-skinned black woman who looked white. Jeanne Crain, who was white, got the part. In 1951, Horne was slated to play "Julie," the "tragic mulatto" in "Show Boat." But Hollywood wasn't too comfortable with interracial love scenes, so Ava Gardner ultimately got the part, and makeup artists used Horne's makeup (Max Factor's "Egyptian Tan") to give Gardner that cafe-au-lait look.
In the late 1920s, Fredi Washington was green-eyed, white-skinned, straight-haired -- and black. Studio suits reportedly gave her a choice: If you want to be a movie star, you've got to pass for white. Instead, Washington carved a career for herself acting in "race movies" with African American directors like Oscar Micheaux -- in brownface, lest anyone think that Paul Robeson was wooing a white girl.
It's ironic that Washington's one mainstream Hollywood role was her tragic turn as Peola in the Academy Award-nominated "Imitation of Life"(1934) -- playing a white-looking black girl who abandoned her dark-skinned mother in her quest to pass.
Hollywood, not to mention America, saw only trouble in shades of beige.
Staff writer Desson Thomson contributed to this report.
Last edited by chasbyrd on Sun 24 Jun 2007 16:18; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 13 Mar 2007 {Posts: 261 } Location: Canada
Posted: Sat 23 Jun 2007 12:06 Post subject:
This is rather funny because I always assumed Angelina Jolie was of mixed heritage somewhere along her bloodlines. If her face is really her face and not created by plastic surgeons, I'd put money on it.
This is rather funny because I always assumed Angelina Jolie was of mixed heritage somewhere along her bloodlines. If her face is really her face and not created by plastic surgeons, I'd put money on it.
She has Native American ancestry. Compare her features to say:
This half Peruvian Quechua girl.
Note the full lips. Which is what people harp on Jolie the most.
French actress Marcheline Bertrand (died) was the mother of Angela Jolie and actor john voight was Angela Jolie's father. Her real name is Angelea Jolie Voight. Angela gets her looks basically from her mother.
Marcheline Bertrand (May 9, 1950 – January 27, 2007) was an American actress of French-Canadian and Indigenous Iroquois descent. According to daughter Angelina Jolie, Bertrand is often wrongly identified as a French actress: "My mom is as far from French Parisian as you can get. She's part Iroquois Indian, from Chicago. She grew up in a bowling alley that my grandparents owned."
http://fansites.hollywood.com/~ajolie/int34.html
AJ looks like her mother.
Bertrand is a name that is New Orleanian and is French.
I do not have a problem with actors playing different ethnic groups.
IMHO, Marrianne Pearl looks Black. With the wig and make-up, AJ , can pull off this role . AJ said in an interview that MP selected her.
Looks, skin shades , ethnic groups, sort to mesh after a while. I do not think you can go too far, QL playing PD. No!!
Vanessa Williams played as Mother Heneritte Delille in a tv movie a few years ago. A White actress with dark hair would have better and truer to this woman to the actually look , not skin color of HD , a Free Woman of Color.
VW as HD. AJ as MP. That 's Hollywood!
I love seeing how make-up and costumes can transfer an actor into the subject he/she is playing . Think back to all of those bio pics of JFK and RFK. Nick Nolte was fine as Jefferson. Anthony Quinn as Onassis in The Greek Tycoon, eventhat movie was not a true bio pic (HAHA)!
Last edited by Creole GAL on Tue 26 Jun 2007 02:26; edited 1 time in total
You are so right. It is Acadian , French from Canada but it is still French from France. The French went to Canda. My last name is French. I am not French. I am not from Canada or France. Many people in Canada share my name and and people in France have the same last name.
I should have said that I hear that name in N.O. a lot as it is heard in Canada and France being French in origin. Whew!!
The same Washington Post article that ran with the title "A Part Colored By History -- Choice of White Actress For Mixed-Race Role Stirs Debate on Insensitivity” now appears in The Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne, Indiana as “Toward colorblind casting: Jolie, ‘Mighty Heart’ spur race debate.”
Of course, America’s obsessive race-consciousness being what it is, the least little thing spurs a debate on the race notion
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