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Arts and Entertainment

Steve McQueen, Harry Belafonte making a movie about Paul Robeson

Singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson wasn’t just a friend to Harry Belafonte – he became one of Belafonte’s chief lifelong inspirations. Now, Belafonte, 87, will have the opportunity to pay tribute to his ultimate role model through film. He is working on a Robeson movie in an unspecified capacity with Steve McQueen, the director whose film “12 Years a Slave” won the Best Picture Oscar this year.

McQueen revealed the Paul Robeson project would be his next film in a speech on Monday at the Hidden Heroes awards in New York. McQueen, like Belafonte, has long been taken with Robeson. In a six-hour video installation piece called “End Credits,” McQueen scrolls through the pages and pages the FBI amassed on Robeson during the McCarthy era while male and female voices read them out of sync.

“His life and legacy was the film I wanted to make the second after ‘Hunger’” – McQueen’s film about the hunger strike of IRA member Bobby Sands – “but I didn’t have the power, I didn’t have the juice,” he told the Guardian.

If he is to make a film that echoes the cinematic poetry of “12 Years,” McQueen will have plenty to mine Robeson’s life. Robeson was the son of former slaves and a multitalented wonder.

A football star at Rutgers, Robeson turned to acting after a career as a lawyer was stopped short by racism. At his first job, the stenographer declared she would “never take dictation from a (n-word).” It wasn’t as though Robeson didn’t face similar challenges on the stage, but he was able to create a home for himself there, especially after playing his most famous role, Othello. He enchanted two of his co-stars, Uta Hagen and Peggy Ashcroft, and had affairs with both. His trademark soul-stirring voice, full of richness and depth, cemented his legacy as one of the country’s great folk singers.

But as magnetic as he was a performer, Robeson’s politics were central to his character: He refused to play to segregated audiences and wasn’t afraid to challenge president Harry S. Truman over the epidemic of lynching still plaguing the South in 1946. When the president told Robeson the country wasn’t ready for an anti-lynching law, Robeson told him black citizens would have to defend themselves. According to New York magazine, that was enough to get him thrown out of the meeting.

Robeson was an unapologetic leftist and he paid for it dearly; the government withdrew his passport for eight years and, with it, Robeson’s ability to make a living playing to overseas audiences when the ones he faced in America grew hostile and unsafe. His later years were marked by deep depression, and he spent time in mental hospitals, where he received more than 50 rounds of electroshock therapy.

Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Belafonte an Oscar and, for his humanitarian work and lifelong commitment to fighting racial and economic injustice, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He quoted Robeson in his acceptance speech.

“Artists are the gatekeepers of truth,” Belafonte said. “They are civilization’s radical voice.”

In “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance,” Belafonte remembered Robeson:

“How vividly I remembered that voice, and that towering figure filling the tiny backstage corridor of the Village Vanguard. ‘Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.’ Those words had stayed with me, and so had his song, of unwavering courage and character. In all I’d done, he guided and inspired me. My whole life was an homage to him.”

If there is anyone Belafonte finds worthy of entrusting with Robeson’s story, it is McQueen. Belafonte praised “12 Years A Slave” as “absolutely without any equivocation the finest picture dealing with a deeper and more profound look at black life, black people, black struggle and black power.”

The admiration is mutual. “We get on like a house on fire,” McQueen told the Guardian of his relationship with Belafonte. “I never thought I’d make a new friend, and a man who is 87 years old but I’m very happy, he’s a beautiful man.”



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