Brock Peters: Brock Peters, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 78, emerged at the time when black actors were beginning to get more assertive and dominant roles in Hollywood movies.
Yet he made his name and is most remembered for the pivotal but passive character of Tom Robinson, the man accused of raping a white girl that liberal lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) defends in court in Robert Mulligan's To Kill A Mockingbird (1962).
A few years ago Peters related how he got the part. "I found myself the last of two people being considered for this role. And I was really worried because my competition was one of our finest actors: James Earl Jones.
"My agent called me and said: we have a meeting for you to talk with the producers, the director and all those concerned, and after this meeting a decision will be made. Well, of course, I was scared out of my wits. I went into the meeting and I tried not to appear frightened but I wanted to look cool and calm and still suggest the character of Tom Robinson, and do that dressed in a suit."
Peters went on to describe how, as Tom Robinson, he cried on cue. "From day one I had to arrive at a point where I burst into tears, could not contain them, had to try to stifle them, and that's not easy to do. Once we were on track I needed to go only to the places of pain, remembered pain, experienced pain and the tears would come, really at will."
Born of African and West Indian parentage as George Fisher in Harlem, New York, he aimed for a showbusiness career from the age of 10. A product of New York's Music and Arts High School, he made his stage debut at the age of 15 playing one of the children in Catfish Row in a 1943 Broadway revival of Gershwin's Porgy And Bess, a work in which he was to appear again later on stage and on film.
He made his television debut in 1953 as a winner on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts show, and the following year he was cast by the director Otto Preminger in the screen version of Carmen Jones, as the brutal Sgt Brown.
He initially clashed with the autocratic director. "One day he chewed me out in front of a lot of people," said Peters. "I lost my temper and I went for him. Later I discovered he was a charming social personality and very warm, and I was surprised to learn that he was a life member of the NAACP [ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]."
In 1959 Peters was in Preminger's screen version of Porgy And Bess in which he played Crown, Bess's former lover who runs away after killing a man, meets her again during a picnic and tries to rape her after singing the duet What You Want Wid Bess? with Dorothy Dandridge (dubbed by Adele Addison).
With a powerful voice, piercing eyes and flaring nostrils, Peters was once described by the Los Angeles Times as "a geyser of an actor who never errs on the side of restraint". He found himself playing dozens of villains. "It was almost disastrous," he explained. "Producers didn't want to see me. They had liked my performances but couldn't see me as anything but a heavy."
In the meantime, on stage, Peters appeared less menacingly in three short-lived shows, Mister Johnson (1956) and the musicals The Body Beautiful (1958) and Kwamina (1961) before getting the role in To Kill A Mockingbird, in which he was seen as a gentle janitor.
This led to sympathetic roles in Bryan Forbes's The L-Shaped Room, where he was a gay jazz trumpeter whose best friend falls in love with a pregnant French girl (Leslie Caron), and in the Boulting brothers' Heavens Above!
Back in the US he returned as a ghetto gangster in Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965), unusual at the time because black actors seldom played such unsympathetic roles. This was followed by Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee, as the leader of a troop of black soldiers.
Back on stage, Peters was nominated for a Tony for his performance as the Rev Stephen Kumalo, the priest in apartheid South Africa in the 1972 revival of the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson musical Lost In The Stars, adapted from the Alan Paton novel, Cry, The Beloved Country. (It was a role he re-created in the film version the following year.)
Brock Peters, actor; born July 2nd, 1927; died August 23rd, 2005