Gloria Foster, Commanding Stage Actress, Is Dead at 64 | Playbill

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News Gloria Foster, Commanding Stage Actress, Is Dead at 64 Gloria Foster, an imposing and uncompromising stage actress who, during the 1960s and '70s, played many roles previously inaccessible to African Americans, died Sept. 29 at her Manhattan home. She was 64.
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Gloria Foster as the title roles in Mother Courage and Medea Photo by Mother Courage Photo by Martha Swope

Gloria Foster, an imposing and uncompromising stage actress who, during the 1960s and '70s, played many roles previously inaccessible to African Americans, died Sept. 29 at her Manhattan home. She was 64.

Ms. Foster came to New York City from the Midwest in 1961 and quickly established herself as a powerful performer able to play characters far beyond her young years and scant life experience. In 1965, she became the first black performer to play Medea in New York. She went on to portray other classical parts, including The Cherry Orchard's Madame Ranevskaya, Long Day's Journey Into Night's Mary Tyrone, Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, the title role in Brecht's Mother Courage, Volumnia in Coriolanus and both Titania and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Ms. Foster first made her mark, however, in the Off-Broadway historical drama, In White America, in which author Martin B. Duberman endeavored to relate, through a chronological patchwork of texts, the untold history of blacks in this country. Ms. Foster's agent, Ernestine McClendon, sent her to a cold reading of the play, though she didn't think her client was right for the project. The actress won the job, though, and played several parts in the drama, including a woman whose husband had been lynched, Sojourner Truth, and, most memorably, an Arkansas girl who tries to enter her Little Rock school following the Supreme Court ruling forbidding segregation, only to be faced with a rabidly angry racist mob.

She made an indelible impression upon audiences and critics. The Village Voice called her "unforgettable"; John Simon said "Miss Foster was magnificent"; and the New York Times' Howard Taubman declared, "Someone should write a play for Miss Foster."

And, indeed, many plays were offered to her, but she chose to remain with In White America for a year. "Young people today, I think, are thinking in terms of stepping stones," said Ms. Foster. "I don't know that I ever thought that way. It sounds ridiculous, but I was always thinking in terms of a more difficult role." Her selectiveness often meant audiences waited years between Foster performances. Over her entire career, she acted in perhaps two dozen professional productions. Moreover, she was rarely tempted by television and film offers and steadfastly refused to sign on for a series. She did appear is two landmark independent films of the '60s, Michael Roemer's "Nothing Like a Man" and Shirley Clarke's "The Cool World" (where she met her one-time husband, Clarence Williams III). But her most famous film part by far is that of The Oracle in the sci-fi hit, "The Matrix."

Ms. Foster's next major theatre role met her exacting criterion. Judith Rutherford Marechal, who produced In White America, wanted her to play Medea. The casting drew attention and controversy. "There was no question who I was," said Foster. "I was an African-American actress. That was the only identity I had. They had a very difficult time getting support."

The production, which ran at the now-defunct Martinique Theatre, opened to mixed reviews, but Ms. Foster was widely praised. She won her second Obie Award for the portrayal. Her first was for In White America.

Ms. Foster had first played Medea at the Goodman School of Drama, where she studied acting and was one of the few African-American students in her class. She was born in Chicago's south side on Nov. 15, 1936. She never knew her father and, after her mother was hospitalized for mental illness, she was taken in by her maternal grandparents Clyde and Elinor Sudds and raised on their farm in rural Janesville, Wisconsin.

At the Goodman School, Ms. Foster was instructed by Bella Itkin, who cast the mature young woman in towering classic roles, thus whetting Ms. Foster's appetite for classical drama. "At the Goodman, you just got the parts before you knew it, because that was what you were supposed to do," she remembered. "Those were the roles that were offered to you. You never thought about it."

Against all odds, given the time, she was offered similar roles in New York. Ms. Foster moved to Manhattan shortly before playing Ruth in a touring production of A Raisin in the Sun starring Claudia McNeill, her first professional job as an actress. Following In White America, she became that rare thing: an African-American actress around whom producers and directors built productions. The Public Theater's Joseph Papp was a early and major supporter, casting her in all black mountings of Chekhov and Shakespeare. In 1980, Papp announced that Ms. Foster would be Mother Courage in an upcoming staging before he had even asked the actress whether she would take the part. Other early collaborators including the Open Theatre's Joseph Chaikin and director Andrei Serban.

In most of her appearances, she utterly commanded the stage, in part due to the monumental figures she routinely played, but also because of her fierce, passionate acting style. Critics rolled out the superlatives to describe her performances. She was "compelling," "substantial," a "thunderbolt," a "majestic, full-voiced, statuesque and stunning actress."

In a certain sense (and despite her progressive political and cultural views), she was very much an actress of the old school, an artist who created theatre with a capital "T." This propensity toward high drama often worked against her, and reviewers criticized her Ranevskaya and Mary Tyrone as inappropriately willful. But, as Ms. Foster herself admitted, she was never interested in playing victims.

With the passing of the progressive casting trends of the '60s and '70s, the roles dried up. From 1980 on, her stage appearances were seldom. One of the few noteworthy credits of this period was Bill Gunn's The Forbidden City, in which she played a ferocious, social-climbing mother described, by Michael Feingold of The Village Voice, as "out of The Silver Cord complicated by Mommie Dearest, Chekhov's Arkadina, and Cocteau's Les parents terribles." She won a Drama Desk Award nomination for her work.

In her final New York stage appearance — and one of her few Broadway turns — she played against type, embodying 105-year-old Sadie, the sweeter, quieter Delaney sister in the storytelling drama, Having Our Say. Mary Alice played the feisty Bessie. The play opened at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, in February 1995, and went on to run to standing-room-only audiences. It then transferred to Broadway's Booth Theatre. Ms. Foster was acclaimed by critics, and stayed with the show for six months. No further New York work followed, however.

Ironically, her last professional stage role was the same as her first — A Raisin in the Sun, this time in 1999 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Ms. Foster's career was examined in Role of a Lifetime (Back Stage Books), a book by this writer which appeared in 1999.

Commenting on the scarcity of roles in her later years, she soberly observed, "At a certain point, I faced a recognition that I was not going to work as much as I wanted to. As long as my desires went toward major roles and difficult roles, perhaps I thought I couldn't expect any more.

"What probably saved me is that I've always felt it was important to live; to experience the day; to experience the hurt, the pain, the love. And come your next role, you're so much more vital.

"Everything is an exploration, or building upon what you've learned. I'm not very good at the business of show business. It was an art form, as far as I was concerned."

— By Robert Simonson

 
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