Bernie Casey
Bernie Casey was a multifaceted American athlete, artist, and actor, born on June 8, 1939, in Wyco, West Virginia. After his parents’ divorce, he moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he developed interests in acting, painting, and writing poetry during his school years. He excelled in athletics, receiving twenty scholarships, ultimately choosing Bowling Green University, where he starred as a football wide receiver while earning a master's degree in fine arts. Casey played professionally for the San Francisco 49ers and later the Los Angeles Rams, achieving notable success, including a Pro Bowl selection and impressive career statistics.
Transitioning from sports to the arts, he held successful exhibitions of his paintings while becoming an actor in Hollywood. Casey appeared in various films, especially during the 1970s, and was part of the blaxploitation genre, showcasing African American narratives. He was active on television, with roles in popular series and miniseries, and later wrote and directed his own film. Casey's legacy as a role model for athletes and African American performers is marked by his diverse accomplishments, and he was posthumously honored for his contributions to culture and education in the African American community. He passed away on September 19, 2017, in Los Angeles, leaving behind a significant impact in multiple fields.
Subject Terms
Bernie Casey
- Born: June 8, 1939
- Birthplace: Wyco, West Virginia
- Died: September 19, 2017
- Place of death: Los Angeles, California
Football player, actor, and artist
Casey progressed from a stellar career in professional football to successes as an actor and as a painter.
Early Life
Bernard Terry Casey was born on June 8, 1939, in Wyco, West Virginia. His parents divorced when he was young, and he and his mother moved to Columbus, Ohio. In grade school he became interested in acting, painting, and writing poetry. He won a citywide contest for which students were to paint pictures of their school. His poems were published in his high school newspaper, and he acted in school plays.
Casey went out for football only because several of his friends had, and he showed talent as a wide receiver. He also played baseball and ran track. He received twenty athletic scholarships, and he chose Bowling Green University because of its acclaimed arts program. In addition to starring in football at Bowling Green, Casey earned a master’s degree in fine arts, with painting his true interest.
Life’s Work
In 1961, the 6-foot, 4-inch Casey became a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, which had chosen him in the first round of the collegiate draft. He played sparingly his first season, catching only ten passes, but he was a starter in 1962, catching fifty-three passes for 819 yards and six touchdowns. Casey compiled comparable numbers throughout his career, with highs of fifty-nine catches in 1965 and 871 yards in 1967, after he was traded to the Los Angeles Rams. He caught only twenty-nine passes in 1968, his final season, but he had his highest average per reception with 19.5 yards. Casey played in 105 games with 359 catches for 5,444 yards and forty touchdowns. He was selected to play in the Pro Bowl All-Star game in 1967.
Casey may have been finished with football but not with the limelight. He had the first exhibition of his paintings at a San Francisco gallery in 1963, and he sold them to buyers more engaged by his art than by his celebrity status as an athlete. By the end of his football career, galleries in Los Angeles and San Francisco had sold more than one hundred of his paintings. His buyers included collector Joseph Hirshhorn, actors Hope Lange and Barbara McNair, and the Beverly Hills Public Library. Casey grew more militant about racial injustice during the 1960s, and his semiabstract paintings, often with poetic text, reflected his anger over the historical treatment of African Americans. He published his first book of poetry, Look at the People, in 1969.
Playing for the Rams gave Casey entrée to Hollywood, which he used to find work in another field he liked, acting. He made his film debut in Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) and appeared alongside Jim Brown, the former Cleveland Browns running back, in the racial drama . . . tick…tick…tick . . . (1970), also starring Fredric March and George Kennedy.
The 1970s were the era of blaxploitation, urban-set action films with African American stars in assertive roles. Casey appeared in such examples of the genre as Black Chariot (1971), Black Gun (1972), Hit Man (1972), and Cleopatra Jones (1973). Casey was also in Boxcar Bertha(1972), an early Martin Scorsese film; played paralyzed basketball star Maurice Stokes in Maurice (1973); and played a policeman in the social drama Cornbread, Earl, and Me (1975), featuring a fourteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne. Casey was in Nicolas Roeg’s science-fiction cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). His most significant role came in the prison-reform drama Brothers (1977), inspired by the controversial real-life relationship between convict George Jackson and political activist Angela Davis.
Casey also worked extensively in television throughout his career, appearing in such series as The Streets of San Francisco, L.A. Law, Murder, She Wrote, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five, Just Shoot Me!, and Girlfriends, in such miniseries as Roots: The Next Generations (1979) and The Martian Chronicles (1980), and in numerous made-for-television films. His significant film appearances after the 1970s were in Burt Reynolds’s Sharkey’s Machine (1981); Never Say Never Again(1983), in which he played James Bond’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) colleague Felix Leiter; Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989); Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield (1994); and Tim Reid’s Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored (1995). In addition Casey joined with such veterans as Jim Brown, Antonio Fargas, and Isaac Hayes in Keenan Ivory Wayans’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), a blaxploitation parody.
Always restless artistically, Casey wrote and directed The Dinner (1997), in which three middle-class African Americans, played by Casey, Wren T. Brown, and Doug Johnson, discuss social and personal issues. Casey financed the film through a consortium of business executives in Savannah, Georgia, where it is set. His film and television appearances after 2000 were few; his last appearance was in the low-budget horror film Vegas Vampires in 2007.
Casey died on September 19, 2017, in Los Angeles, after suffering a stroke.
Significance
By working steadily in films and television for more than four decades and playing a wide variety of roles, Casey was a role model for both former athletes and African American performers in general. By demonstrating that determination and talent could lead to acclaim in football, acting, and painting, Casey was a true Renaissance man. His contribution to African American culture was honored in 1996 when Georgia’s Savannah College of Art and Design named a restored building after him in recognition of his work to improve educational opportunities for African Americans.
Bibliography
Flatley, Guy. “Bernie Casey on Art, Poetry and Soledad Brothers.” The New York Times, March 25, 1977, p. 56.
Lee, Felicia R. “At Lunch with Bernie Casey: A Filmmaker Battling Flawed Images of Blacks.” The New York Times, November 27, 1997, p. E1.
Roble, Roland. “Bernie Casey.” Essence 8 (August, 1977): 72-75.
Sandomir, Richard. "Bernie Casey, Who Glided from Football to Hollywood, Dies at 78." The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/arts/bernie-casey-dead-actor-football.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.