By Mel Cooke, Freelance WriterWESTERN BUREAU:
"ACTING IS going to be on the decline some day. It is probably on the decline now. But my activism will always be there."
Danny Glover stepped from the big screen into the clubhouse of the White Witch golf course in Montego Bay, St. James on Saturday morning. Along with Francisco 'The Mighty Sparrow' Slinger, he was part of the 2002 Jamerican Film and Music Festival's 'Coffee with...' series.
There were no lethal weapons or star attitude on hand and, if there were any doubts about his perspective on himself, the casually attired, grey-stubbled Danny Glover dispelled them with an intense but intimate voice.
SOCIAL ACTIVISM
In an appropriate twist, it was his social activism which led to an acting career, as he responded to a challenge by a visiting playwright while a first-year student at San Francisco State University. He majored in Economics.
"She said I want some of you so-called revolutionary brothers to be in this play. And I knew it was a challenge," Danny Glover said.
He did not back down and, at 20, with absolutely no acting experience, trod the boards for the first time. It was the fall of 1967.
However, some seven years earlier the just-turned-teenager Danny had spoken out against prejudice for the first time, lecturing a cashier in a store about bad treatment of a customer. It was a moment of mammoth proportions for a child who was considered an introvert and had difficulty reading because of dyslexia.
There are no tales of overnight success in Danny Glover's life; it was not a snap of the fingers from that first play to being the man who partners Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series.
Danny Glover had a nine to five too.
"I worked for six years in the community development out of the (San Francisco) Mayor's office," he said. It was a period in which he was not only involved in the black movement, but became more aware of the international situation, with apartheid in South Africa and the Ian Smith regime in the then Rhodesia (now Mozambique). While attending the Black Actors Workshop, Danny Glover was introduced to the concept of ancestry.
His first movie role, in Places of the Heart, came in 1983, out of a play he had done on Broadway some three years earlier. It is a day that will always stand out in Danny Glover's life the real as well as screen versions.
"The day I knew I got the role was August 23, 1983. It was the same day my mother died. She died in an automobile accident," Danny Glover said. "My mother had this determination. My mother was the first in the family to graduate from college. I dedicated my work to her."
The movie roles kept coming - Witness, Silverado, the first Lethal Weapon.
"I was very fortunate with Lethal Weapon, because I was part of a franchise," Danny Glover said.
However, it is not this 'franchise', with all the juicy, money-making possibilities the word implies, which he ranks as his mental box office hit. That place of honour goes to Beloved, where the activist comes front and centre.
It was not an easy role.
"I explained to you how difficult it was preparing for that (role). And the pain of preparing for that. And for the audience, the pain is equally excruciating for them. Whether it is slavery or post-slavery, it is a very painful part of our history. The brutality..."
"It is a part of our history that we have not dealt with yet. In the United States we have not dealt with it. We have not spoken truthfully about it," Danny Glover said, his voice getting more intense than ever.
Placing Beloved in the process of healing ('just like how the Jews are connected with the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition'), Danny Glover, who attended this year's World Conference on Racism in South Africa, said:
"But it takes two to tango. That process has been allowed to fester for us. We haven't even dealt with an apology yet."
"When we talk about pain, there must be embarrassment. There must be guilt. You can't do anything about it if your wife is sold. If your child is sold you can't do anything about it. That's pain. That's embarrassment," he said to a quiet gathering.
STAGE VS. SCREEN
Danny Glover prefers the stage to the screen, because of the interactive an ever-changing nature of plays as opposed to films. "The beautiful thing about stage is that as something happens you react to it. The crux of acting is listening and if you don't relax you don't hear. The crux is listening - you hear something and you respond. It is difficult to replicate that in film," he said.
"On-stage every performance is a new one. You do not try to replicate what happened last night or the night before."
The level of camaraderie is also different, as stage actors tend to get group up after a show while screen ones tend to get away from each other after 15 or 16 hours of working together.
"In film, each time you try to find the centre of the character," Danny Glover said, speaking about getting involved in martial arts for a particular role. "Sometimes I use music, what the character hears in his head. I did a character hearing Coltrane in his head. I look for a connection in rhythm, in spacing. Some (characters) have it in their feet, some have it in their shoulders," he said.
"I use photographs a lot. And music."
He does not take the character home, though, no matter how accurately he locates its centre. "It begins when I put on the clothes, when I imagine the smells - and it goes when I stop working at the end of the day," he said.
His greatest challenge in the acting profession is, ironically, related to being successful at it. "You have the possibility of writing and defining relationships for yourself, instead of going off on a tangent. And with all the attention you get it can happen," he said.
In Danny Glover's acting-activist-all-around-good-guy world, it all comes together in the story.
"We create this idea that we have this world in which we can have diversity, where all voices are primary voices. That is the challenge, to keep this idea alive," Danny Glover said.
Have coffee with The Mighty Sparrow tomorrow in The Gleaner.
