Brock Peters

Actor

• Born: July 2, 1927
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: August 23, 2005
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Although best known for his film role as a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in the landmark film To Kill a Mockingbird, Peters, in a career that spanned four decades, was a gifted character actor who worked extensively in both films and television.

Early Life

Brock Peters was born George Fisher to a French African father and British West Indian mother. He was born in the impoverished neighborhood of Harlem. Because Peters’s father, a sailor, was away for long periods of time, Peters was raised largely by his mother, a gifted singer who entertained the boy with songs from her Caribbean upbringing. She recognized Peters’s vocal talent—by six, he was singing boy soprano in a neighborhood church, St. Philip’s. Later, with his voice now a commanding baritone, he attended the prestigious High School of Music and Art, a school devoted to nurturing promising students in the performing arts.

Although Peters took classes in acting, it was music he loved. He received training in voice and music theory, particularly the avant-garde experiments in jazz. Although he landed the small part of Jim in the Broadway production of Porgy and Bess in 1943 and toured with South Pacific, Peters doubted that he would succeed as an actor and pursued his second love, sports. He earned a degree in physical education from the City College of New York in 1947 with the intention of teaching should he not succeed in theater. For most of the next decade, however, Peters worked steadily in minor roles. He also sang jazz in cabarets and nightclubs (his sonorous voice drew comparisons to Paul Robeson). He cut two jazz albums that, while well received, did not sell well. He also spent time as a backup singer for Harry Belafonte, then a national sensation as a calypso singer (Peters can be heard on Belafonte’s 1956 classic “Day-O”). To make ends meet, Peters also did odd jobs as a physical education instructor at a YMCA, hospital orderly, clerk in the shipyards, and maitre’d.

Life’s Work

On the advice of his agent, Peters began pursuing opportunities in Hollywood. In Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), a modern interpretation of Georges Bizet’s classic opera Carmen with an all-black cast, Peters played Sergeant Brown, who runs the parachute factory where Carmen works. Preminger was fascinated by Peters’s deep voice, certain its sinister quality made Peters believable as a villain. He cast Peters to play Crown, the despicable and violent lover of Bess in the 1959 film of Porgy and Bess.

Eager to avoid being typecast as a villain, Peters next appeared in the 1962 British drama The L-Shaped Room, in which he portrayed an introspective gay trombone player, living in a rundown boarding house in London, who becomes entangled in the emotional life of an unmarried pregnant French woman, played by Leslie Caron. That same year, Peters broke into mainstream stardom as Tom Robinson, a crippled sharecropper accused of raping a white woman, in the Oscar-winning film To Kill a Mockingbird. Although set in Depression-era Alabama, the story spoke to its time, the tempestuous years of the Civil Rights movement, and was hailed as a cutting-edge investigation into the troubling implications of racism.

Peters won critical acclaim for the role. Afterward, eager to distance himself from being typecast as a victim, he took the part of Rodriguez, a ruthless ghetto pimp, in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964). Established as a versatile character actor with one of the most recognizable voices and faces in film, Peters worked steadily for two decades. He also used his clout to produce numerous small films made by promising black directors—Peters was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1976. In 1972, he returned to Broadway in Lost in the Stars, the Kurt Weill musical based on Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a harrowing account of racism in South Africa. Peters played Stephen Kumalo, a rural priest who travels to Johannesburg to help care for his sister’s sons only to have his faith tested when one of the sons commits a murder during a botched robbery. Peters received a Tony Award nomination and won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical.

In addition to film and theater, Peters became a fixture on nighttime series television, appearing in scores of prime-time dramas beginning in 1964. In his later years, he was best known for his work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the mid-1990’s. Perhaps his most notable achievement in a long career on television came with his recurring role (1982-1989) as the incorruptible and unflappable Detective Frank Lewis on the CBS daytime series The Young and the Restless. In 1990, he was presented with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild.

Although never a strident voice for civil rights, Peters was committed to black actors’s rights to fair pay, equal billing, and roles that reflected the complexity of the African American experience rather than stereotypes. In later years, he embraced the iconic status of his role as Tom Robinson and made appearances with To Kill a Mockingbird’s reclusive author, Harper Lee, and other members of the cast. He spoke eloquently at the funeral of the film’s star, Gregory Peck, in 2003. Then in his seventies, Peters continued to work in series television and did several stints as a voice actor in cable cartoon series.

In mid-2005, Peters received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He died on August 23, 2005.

Significance

Known primarily for a supporting role (he is onscreen barely twenty minutes in Mockingbird), Peters never enjoyed leading-man status. He did not seek the incendiary roles played by other prominent black actors of his era—strong, angry characters who confront racist white Americans. Peters was an actor who happened to be African American. He enjoyed a long and full career in three demanding media—stage, television, and film—and was determined to explore the emotional depths of secondary characters that in the hands of lesser actors would have become marginal and forgettable. Peters created a significant body of work in which such secondary characters became a dominant presence. Moreover, he did it for more than four decades in a business with a notoriously short attention span. Unlike other black entertainers of his era who branched into activism, Peters maintained his commitment to acting, allowing his characters themselves to become his most eloquent (and radical) argument for the dignity of the African American everyman.

Bibliography

Fearn-Banks, Kathleen. The A to Z of African American Television. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Helpful reference book that includes Peters (and a listing of his work in television). Defines his place in the evolution of black representation in network television. Includes illustrations.

Grant, Barry, ed. American Cinema of the 1960’s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Wide-ranging assessment of the cinema in the era most associated with Peters. Includes an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird that examines it as both a coming-of-age classic and one of the earliest civil rights films.

MacDonald, Fred J. Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948. East Windsor, Conn.: Wadsworth, 1992. Valuable assessment of the emergence of African Americans in television that places Peters, as the defining black character actor of his era, in a helpful context.