This blog is a continuation of our earlier collaboration (which can be found here and here). These posts focused on our first efforts to set up a workflow to image 5.25-inch floppy disks using a…
The late Sidney Poitier became a movie star at a time when Hollywood tended to relegate Black actors to roles as servants, appearing for just a scene or two, often as comic relief. But he was rarely a supporting player, even at the start of his career. He took leads, specializing in a specific type: the educated, well-mannered, middle-class professional who had assimilated into the parts of white society willing to accept him.
PITTSBURGH — I can’t wait until I’m 45 and get all those great parts. --Elizabeth Hartman, in a 1971 interview.
The first reports of 43-year-old Elizabeth Hartman’s June 10 suicide here were sketchy. Homicide detectives weren’t sure just who the slight woman was who had thrown herself from the fifth-story window of her efficiency apartment. A handful of neighbors volunteered what they knew. She was an unemployed actress, they thought, who had starred long ago in some movie with Sidney Poitier.
She would have hated that description. Even though she was subsisting on disability insurance, Social Security benefits and family handouts, even though her days were spent with various psychiatrists or wandering through the Carnegie Art Museum or merely sitting, listening to records, when somebody asked Hartman what she did, she replied, “I’m a film actress.”