![]() ![]() The Ceremonies role would pay him $112 a week, while he would have to do the untested play for free. O ’Neal won the role, but was also offered another right afterward, for a play slated for a weeklong tryout at the small experimental theater at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. When I got back to the office, he took one look at me and said, ‘Well, now, that ’s better! ’ ” “By this time, I was getting pretty desperate, so I went out and bought an Afro wig. “As soon as I stepped into the room, the producer said, ‘you won ’t do, ’ ” he told Peterson. One day in 1970 he tried out for a play called Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. Part of the reason was due to his appearance: with his long, straight hippie hair and lighter skin, O ’Neal failed to fit the bill for standard African-American roles in theater. He taught for two years there and tried to win parts in off-Broadway productions, but found it difficult. ” In 1964, offered a job teaching acting classes at the groundbreaking Harlem Youth Arts Program, O ’Neal relocated to New York City. “It was good training, ” he said of the Karamu years in the New York Times interview, “and, though I wasn ’t paid, at least I wasn ’t charged, as I would have been at an actor ’s studio. He worked as a house painter to support his acting career. Within months, O ’Neal had joined the Karamu House ensemble and spent the next eight years performing in plays like A Raisin in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire. “I saw Finian ’s Rainbow there and it blew my mind, ” he recalled in the interview with Peterson. 1956-64 Harlem Youth Arts Program, NY, acting instructor, 1964-66,Īwards: Actors ’ Equity, Clarence Derwent Award, 1969, Village Voice, Obie (Off- Broadway) Award for best performance, 1970, and Drama Desk Award, 1970, all for No Place to Be Somebody.īack to 1913 and featured interracial productions. Returning to Cleveland, his prospects dim, he even considered taking a dreaded factory job himself, but one day a friend took him to see a play at the Karamu House, an experimental theater group in Cleveland that dated At a Glance …īorn September 1, 1937, in Utica, NY died of pancreatic cancer, January 14, 2004, in Los Angeles, CA son of a factory worker and a hospital employee married wife ’s name, Audrey Pool,Ĭareer Actor, 1956-2004. His mother found a job in a hospital and, after finishing high school, O ’Neal spent one semester at Ohio State University in Columbus, where he preferred playing bridge and chess to attending class, and earned dismal grades as a result. Tragedy struck the O ’Neal family again just six months after the father ’s death, when O ’Neal ’s brother, a truck driver, died in an accident. “I swore right then that they ’d never work me to death in those factories, ” he told Peterson in the New York Times. His father died when he was 16, and his son believed the hard labor was the cause of death. ” The idea of a dream deferred became a force in O ’Neal ’s own tenuous ambitions, he told the newspaper ’s Maurice Peterson. Yet as O ’Neal told the New York Times in a lengthy 1972 interview, his father “kept his clarinet and saxophone up in the attic, and I never even knew he had been a musician until after he was dead. His father was a factory worker who had been a jazz musician in the 1920s and even played in the pit orchestra for the hit revue Blackbirds of 1929. O ’Neal was born on September 1, 1937, in Utica, New York, but he grew up in a working-class black neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. The stage-trained actor ’s “interpretation of the long-haired, ultra-hip, ultra-violent cocaine dealer, ” noted Guardian journalist Ronald Bergan, “who wore tight white suits and drove a customised Cadillac, made him into an instant star, mainly among the vast urban black movie-going public. Considered one of the classics in the “blaxploitation ” genre of the era, Superfly featured O ’Neal as the iconic anti-hero of a gritty urban milieu who tries to cash out of the drug-dealing business with one final, lucrative transaction. For some three decades before his death from cancer in 2004, actor Ron O ’Neal struggled to distance himself from his 1972 role as Young-blood Priest in the 1972 smash movie, Superfly. ![]()
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