Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Nuns told her that “no man will ever want you, because you’re black”; a career counsellor said she should “consider taking man friends” to support herself. “I was told I wouldn’t amount to anything and should consider prostitution,” [Rosemary] Adaser says.
Her black background was vilified and even denied, she says, and she was constantly told that she would never be wanted in Irish society. “I was not allowed any identity at all. That is very, very damaging for the soul.”
THEY are two of the most in-demand people in showbiz and Beyonce and Zendaya are now in talks to team up.
I hear both have had early discussions about creating a remake of movie classic Imitation Of Life.
The groundbreaking 1934 film, remade in 1959 starring Lana Turner, grapples with questions of race, class and gender as an aspiring white actress takes in an African-American widow whose mixed-race daughter longs to pass as white…
In Fanny Hurst’s novel, Delilah’s daughter dreams of working in white restaurants, achieves her dream of passing and marries a white man before escaping America and her identity. In the 1934 movie as well as Sirk’s version Delilah/Annie’s daughter doesn’t get away so cleanly.
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When Douglas Sirk left Hollywood he was at the zenith of his career, twenty years after he’d arrived there as a refugee from Nazi Germany, unsure if he’d ever make another movie. He had just made his most successful picture, based on what was probably the most controversial topic in America at the time. Maybe he understood that it’s always best to leave when you’re at the top, or maybe he was just tired.
Based on a novel by Fanny Hurst, the original film directed by John M. Stahl had Colbert’s Bea create a culinary empire based on a pancake recipe passed down through the family of Delilah (Beavers), her African-American maid. Both women prosper, but Bea’s happiness is threatened when her daughter falls in love with the man she wants to marry. James M. Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce – later made into a movie with Joan Crawford and a miniseries starring Kate Winslet – is basically a hardboiled rewrite of Hurst’s story, excising the crucial secondary plot involving Delilah and her daughter, a young woman striving to pass for white…
