actor; director
Personal Information
Born February 26, 1943, in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Education: Boston University, B.A. in theater; New York University, M.F.A. from Tisch School of Fine Arts; studied directing at American Film Institute.
Career
Acting credits include Broadway and off-Broadway productions of Barefoot in the Park, Plaza Suite, Look Back in Anger, Emperor Jones, Macbeth, Richard III, Othello, Slave Ship, Days of Absence, and Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Films appearances include Car Wash, Universal, 1976; American Gigolo, Paramount, 1980; Commando, Twentieth Century Fox, 1985; No Man's Land, New Yorker Films, 1987; Action Jackson, Lorimar, 1988; Predator, 1987; and Bird on a Wire. Has appeared in episodes of various television series. Director of more than 70 episodes of over 20 television series, teleplays for PBS and CBS, and feature films A Rage in Harlem, 1991, and Deep Cover, New Line Cinema, 1992.
Life's Work
Bill Duke has enjoyed a long and unique career as both an actor and director in theater, television, and film. During the 1970s he directed more than 30 off-Broadway plays. In the 1980s he focused on television, directing three teleplays for the American Playhouse series on PBS. He also directed numerous episodes of various television series, including the hits Hill Street Blues and Dallas. As an actor, Duke is known to moviegoers for his portrayals of fearsome and frightening villains in such movies as American Gigolo, Commando, Predator, and Bird on a Wire. He also played roles in several episodes of popular television series, including Benson, Maddox, Starsky and Hutch, and Kojak. In 1980 he was even the star of a short-lived series called Kings of the Hill.
Duke first became interested in the performing arts while attending Boston University, where he had originally enrolled as a pre-med student. He eventually majored in theater there and then went on to earn a master's in fine arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Duke later enrolled in the American Film Institute (AFI) and in 1979 received the AFI's lifetime achievement award as best young director for his first short film, titled "The Hero."
Duke began his career as an actor, initially in the small theaters of Harlem and elsewhere around New York City. In 1969 he performed some of his own works at Harlem's New Heritage Theater. That year he also acted in LeRoi Jones's Slave Ship, playing the role of Akano, at the Chelsea Center of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Portraying an African in bondage, he raged against his fate in the hold of the ship carrying him to slavery in the United States. In 1970 Duke acted in Days of Absence, by Douglas Turner Ward, as part of a double bill for the Negro Ensemble Company of New York. He had three roles--First Man, Industrialist, and Rastus--in the play, a revival originally performed successfully off Broadway in 1965. Duke then performed in the 1971 run of Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, a musical by Melvin Van Peebles. Although the theater critics of the New York Daily News and the New York Post gave it negative reviews, the play ran for 325 performances.
In 1980 Duke won the lead role in the short-lived television series Kings of the Hill. About a black family living in Tennessee in the 1930s, the series featured Duke as a blacksmith. Produced by television legend Norman Lear, Kings of the Hill followed on the heels of the television miniseries based on Alex Haley's novel Roots; Haley himself supervised scripts for the program.
Of his role in the series, Duke said in the New York Amsterdam News, "Luther is a community leader, a churchgoer, the head of a family. He has all the solid qualities that Blacks have had denied us in weekly programs. His wife is happy as a homemaker, who keeps the house together and gives the children their moral values." Duke also noted that in order for a show like Kings of the Hill to survive it would need to be actively supported by black families. "Very few of the families that are surveyed for the Nielson ratings are Black. So we have got to go outside that structure," he contended. Urging viewers to write letters of support for the series, he said, "You'd be surprised how much impact all this direct communication from viewers has on network programmers." Unfortunately, however, Kings of the Hill was cancelled after one season.
As a film actor Duke is known to movie audiences for his bad guy roles in Commando, Predator and Bird on a Wire. Prior to his appearance in the 1980 film American Gigolo, Duke was probably best known for his part in Car Wash as the confused young man Adullah. In American Gigolo, which starred Richard Gere as a male prostitute, Duke played a pimp--a player in a game of aberrant sexual behavior and murder. According to New York Amsterdam News contributor Nelson George, "The character is somewhat sleazy, but Duke's acting skill is apparent." Of the veracity of Duke's role, director Paul Schrader said in Film Comment, "You want to see the black guy (Leon, a pimp) squashed out. You want to see his head bounce like a walnut down the street. Then you feel terrible for wanting it."
Duke's directing credentials were established while he shepherded more than 30 off-Broadway plays for such producers as Joseph Papp and Woody King, Jr. In December of 1972 he directed The Secret Place, by Garrett Morris, who would later achieve fame as an original member of television's Saturday Night Live. In 1985 Duke directed the experimental one-act play Sonata at Los Angeles's Theatre of Arts. Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, it was apparently too experimental for critic Robert Koehler, who described "a scramble of skits," seen through the hallucinating eyes of a Shakespeare-quoting hobo.
During the 1980s Duke amassed more than 100 television directing credits, including more than 70 episodes of roughly 20 television series such as Miami Vice, Dallas, Crime Story, Cagney and Lacey, and Hill Street Blues. His television directorial debut came in 1982 when he directed episodes of Knot's Landing, Falcon Crest, and Flamingo Road for Lorimar Productions. Duke's most prominent and critically acclaimed television work, however, has been his direction of teleplays for the PBS series American Playhouse. In 1984 he directed his first feature for television-- The Killing Floor --about a black sharecropper who risked his life to unionize an early twentieth-century Chicago meatpacking plant. The feature was selected as one of seven films chosen for Critic's Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985. Later, Duke directed Johnnie Mae Gibson, a two-hour CBS Movie of the Week. That was followed by a three-hour PBS version of Lorraine Hansberry's famed A Raisin in the Sun, which starred Danny Glover and Esther Rolle.
In 1989 Duke directed another teleplay for American Playhouse. It was The Meeting, a 90-minute drama that depicted an imaginary meeting between black leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Written in 1987 by Jeffrey Stetson, The Meeting was reviewed in Variety. "'The Meeting' points up how much the two men did for the cause, and how different they were in their approach--and even in their goals," the influential entertainment trade journal observed. "As such, it's an important document about American civil rights."
During 1990 Duke was at work directing an all-black ensemble cast in the film adaptation of Chester Himes's novel A Rage in Harlem. Himes's novels had also been the basis for the films Cotton Comes to Harlem and Uptown Saturday Night. Characters from the earlier films appear in A Rage in Harlem, and all three films share Himes's comic vision. Rage in Harlem co-producer Stephen Woolley told Premiere magazine why Bill Duke was sought as the film's director: In large part, the decision was based on Duke's television track record and his work on historical subjects. "A lot of the younger black directors are auteurists [filmmakers who believe that the director is the primary creative force in producing a motion picture] whose work is built around personal experiences. We needed someone who was older and secure enough to collaborate and make a picture that we could distribute widely, but who still had a passion for the material."
Woolley continued: "Bill's Hill Street Blues experience was very important to us because of the way that series mixed humor and violence. There's very little sarcasm or cynicism here--his vision of the film doesn't condescend, like a lot of Hollywood movies, and there's no wink-wink, like with [comedic stars] Eddie Murphy or Robert Townsend. The movie is as far from [Murphy's film] Harlem Nights as could be conceived."
The film's producers consulted leading man Forest Whitaker, among others, in their search for a black director. According to Premiere, "[Co-producer Kerry] Boyle and Woolley believed that maintaining the cultural integrity of the novel demanded a black director." Woolley explained, "There's a blackness to Himes's writing that comes from an ironic statement about life and poverty, about the humor rising out of hopelessness. We wanted to arrive at the visual equivalent of Himes's prose. We felt it would be an absolute dishonor to Himes for a white to direct it. It would be folly, madness, to make it without a black director."
Regarding his feature directorial debut, Duke told the New York Times, "Television is an excellent training ground for a director. If you work consistently in television, as I did, you have to come in on time and on budget. You have to know how to get along with and instruct actors. You have to know how to manage a crew and hire people to enable you to manifest your vision. So the basic elements of film are in television."
Duke selected Robin Givens to play Rage' s female lead, Imabelle. In spite of the controversy surrounding Givens's breakup with boxer-husband Mike Tyson, Duke felt she could meet the demands of the part. According to Premiere, "The powerful screen potential Givens displayed during her auditions and screen tests" clinched the role for her in Duke's mind. "I saw 300 women for the part of Imabelle, and it got down to four of them," the director recalled. "Robin was one. At that point, I decided to do an old-fashioned screen test with one of the toughest scenes emotionally in the script. It's the love scene where Slim realizes that Imabelle has been with another man." Duke felt Givens proved she had the glamour and star potential he was looking for.
On its release in 1991 A Rage in Harlem received mixed reviews. Veteran film critic Stanley Kauffmann called it a "creaky comedy-thriller" in the New Republic. Vincent Canby of the New York Times deemed the film a "lightweight comedy caper" while praising Givens's acting ability; he wrote, "Because the screenplay is so thin, the characters are revealed entirely by the actors who play them. Miss Givens does particularly well as a doxy with a heart of gold as well as a trunk full of it. She looks great and shows a real flair for absurd comedy." Similarly, Rolling Stone cited Givens in its summation of the film: "Givens adds dimension and true grit to a film all too eager to settle for being a slick Hollywood package."
In early 1992 Duke served as a juror at actor-director Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival. He had recently completed directing his second feature film, Deep Cover. Starring Larry Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum, the film tells the story of an undercover narcotics officer seduced by the lifestyle of the drug dealers he is assigned to apprehend. Though Entertainment Weekly contributor Owen Gleiberman took issue with the narrative approach of the film, he described Deep Cover as "stylish and impassioned," calling it an attempt to "blend the commercial, gut-wrenching pleasures of an inner-city shoot-'em-up with [a] complex moral rage ...." Alternately citing Duke's "craftsmanship" and "explosive vision," Gleiberman decided, "Still, if [the] film fails as narrative, it succeeds ... as a kind of stylized fever dream. The movie peels away every layer of hope, revealing a red-hot core of nihilistic despair."
Another Entertainment Weekly piece explored Duke's use of improvisation on the set of Deep Cover. Clearly, Duke's experience as an actor has aided him in creating a uniquely productive actor/director relationship; Entertainment Weekly reported, "Duke recalls: '[Fishburne] hated working with me in the beginning. He's used to rehearsing a scene the way it's going to be shot. I said, "Larry, that's not how I work." It always made him nervous, but he started to trust me and we had a good collaboration.'" Whether as actor or director--or, in this instance, as the special link between the two--Duke has throughout his career maintained impeccable production values and unwavering fidelity to his social ideals and personal artistic mandate. In so doing he has become an important force in American dramatic arts.
Awards
Lifetime achievement award for best young director, American Film Institute, 1979.
Further Reading
Sources
- Entertainment Weekly, April 24, 1992.
- Essence, July 1991.
- Film Comment, March/April 1980.
- Jet, May 17, 1982.
- Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1985; August 15, 1986.
- New Republic, August 5, 1991.
- New York Amsterdam News, February 16, 1980.
- New York Post, October 21, 1971.
- New York Times, March 17, 1970; June 15, 1990; May 3, 1991.
- Premiere, April 1991, May 1992.
- Rolling Stone, June 13, 1991.
- Variety, May 17, 1989.
- Additional information for this profile was obtained from a Miramax Films press release on the film A Rage in Harlem, 1991.
— David Bianco
