Remembering film pioneer Earl Cameron

(August 8, 1917-July 3, 2020)

Earl Cameron receiving his 2009 Commander of British Empire medal

Earl Cameron, the Bermuda-born British actor who broke through the “color barrier” to become one of the first significant black performers in British cinema, died Friday, July 3, aged 102 (just a month shy of 103!). Cameron made his acting debut in director Basil Dearden’s Pool of London, a 1951 film about a diamond robbery set in a post-war London of racial prejudice that you can stream for free through Kanopy using your Enoch Pratt library card.

Cameron won critical acclaim for his performance in Pool of London as a sailor who unwittingly becomes involved with a smuggling plot. It was considered the first major role for a black actor in mainstream British cinema and was also the first British film to depict an interracial romantic relationship: Cameron’s West Indian seaman Johnny Lambert meets and falls in love with white theater ticket taker Pat (Susan Shaw of It Always Rains On Sunday, also available to stream through Kanopy), and the two share an instant chemistry and mutual affection as they have dinner and spend a tender, innocent day walking the streets of London.

Susan Shaw and Earl Cameron in “Pool of London” (1951)

But while Pat’s carefree attitude to their relationship shows a naivety about the miscegenation taboos of the times, Johnny can see clearly that their “friendship” cannot survive contemporary society’s racial divide.  In a key scene in the film, Johnny and Pat have the following conversation that sums up their plight:

Johnny: “When you’re at the wheel of a ship at night, you think about a lot of things you don’t understand. You wonder why one man’s born white and another isn’t. And how about God himself; what color is he? And the stars seem so close and the world so small in comparison with all the other worlds above you, it doesn’t seem to matter so much how we were born.”
Pat: “It doesn’t matter.”
Johnny: “It does, you know.”

Ealing Studios, the film’s producers, also made sure Pat and Johnny’s romance was doomed: no physical intimacy such as kissing or embracing transpired between the lovestruck couple, though the film’s narrative seems to cry out for it. Such were the social mores of the day and Cameron knew them well. Fortunately for him, life didn’t imitate art, for in real life both his wives, Audrey and Barbara, were white. But British cinema wasn’t quite ready for its first black star. It would take another five years before he landed another major role in Terence Young’s Safari (1956), followed up by an acclaimed performance in Roy Ward Baker’s Flame in the Streets (1961).

“I would still say it’s the best part I’ve had in films,” Cameron told historians Stephen Bourne and Richard Dacre, reflecting on Pool  of London in 1997. “The amount of fan mail I received was amazing. People felt sorry for me. They thought I really was that lonely Jamaican guy wandering around London looking for friends!”

But like the characters he played, Cameron had a remarkable tenacity and would go on to make many more films over the course of his long career, for which he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009. His major big screen credits include Flame in the Streets (1961), Thunderball (1965), The Interpreter (2005) and Inception (2010); on television he was one of the first black actors to appear on Doctor Who (his performance as Williams in 1966’s “The Tenth Planet" serial also made him the first black actor to play an astronaut onscreen) and appeared in a number of 1960s Patrick McGoohan series (Danger Man, Secret Agent Man, The Prisoner), as well as the 1996 TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. As critic Ashley Clark wrote during a 2017 British Film Institute “Black Star” retrospective of Cameron’s career:

“ ...to watch a young Cameron in Pool of London and Flame in the Streets is to see an actor who possesses a dramatic force comparable to Cameron’s friend, fellow Caribbean, and co-star (in the 1973 film A Warm December) Sidney Poitier: a handsome, composed, and commanding screen presence possessed of palpable intensity, dignity, and intelligence. It is also to imagine a poignant alternative history — one where that brilliance was fully recognized, amplified, and celebrated.” 

Despite the studio limitations imposed on Pool of London, director Basil Dearden never shied away from the taboo issues of race and sexuality, treating the subjects with a dignity unusual for the times. 1959’s Sapphire, made in the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill riots and once again featuring Cameron (this time as Dr. Robbins, a dignified black professional well aware of the burden of his color) addressed “racial passing” as well as the prejudice against Commonwealth immigrants in 1950s London. And 1961’s Victim sympathetically tackled homosexuality, which until 1967 was illegal in the UK and caused its practicioners to live in fear of being imprisoned, blackmailed or blacklisted. These latter two titles are part of  Basil Dearden’s London Underground, a four-film DVD box set that you can check out from Pratt using our Sidewalk Service pickup or Books-by-Mail services.

Earl Cameron’s final scene as Dr. Robbins in Sapphire offers perhaps the best summation of his long career as a black actor overcoming racial prejudice in his life and chosen profession. “I see all kinds of sickness in my practice...I’ve never yet seen the kind you can cure in a day.”  

Earl Cameron with Nigel Patrick in "Sapphire" (1959)

Related links:

Earl Cameron discusses his career in this YouTube interview.