Canada Lee

Background

Canada Lee was born Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata in New York City, the son of James Cornelius Canegata and Lydia Whaley Canegata. His paternal grandfather was an importer and shipowner on St. Croix. Against family wishes, Canegata's father shipped to New York as a cabin boy; his decision to remain there led to estrangement from the family. Leonard Canegata was raised in the San Juan Hill district of Manhattan.

Education

He attended school in Harlem, which was emerging as the largest black community in the world. His academic education was supplemented with violin lessons given by J. Rosamond Johnson, the brother of the writer-poet and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. Canegata never finished grade school.

Career

Canegata ran away from the strict discipline of a conservative home at the age of fourteen to seek his fortune as a jockey--he dreamed of returning "famous and dressed in boots and a blouse with bright colors. " After working at Saratoga as an exercise boy, he rode in races at Belmont, Aqueduct, and Jamaica in New York City and in Montreal, Canada. He admitted years later, however, that he "never had a good hand on a horse. "

After three or four years as a jockey, Canegata returned to Manhattan, penniless and too heavy to ride professionally. But "I've always been like a leaf on a stream, going wherever the tide took me, " he said of himself, and he drifted into boxing, having been inspired by the accomplishments of Jack Johnson. He won the lightweight junior amateur national and metropolitan intercity championships. During this period he changed his name to Canada Lee because promoters and referees found his real name difficult to pronounce. About 1925 Lee turned professional. He fought more than 200 bouts, moving from light-weight to welterweight to middleweight. He lost only twenty-five decisions and apparently was never knocked out. In 1930, when he was a contender for the middleweight championship, he suffered a detached retina during a bout with Willie Garfola. His sight was impaired, and by 1933 he was forced to give up boxing. Lee won and spent a great deal of money as a fighter; it has been said that he earned $90, 000 and wound up with 50 cents.

After a brief career as a jazz band leader, one day in 1934 Lee wandered into the Harlem Young Men's Christian Association during the casting of an amateur production of Brother Mose, a play by Frank Wilson, a minor black dramatist. Wilson asked Lee to read for a minor role; he did so and was given the part. He was recognized as a "natural" and was later brought into the Works Projects Administration Federal Theater Project which was thriving in Harlem. In 1935 Lee won the role of Blacksnake in the Theater Union's revival of the proletarian play Stevedore. Between April 1936 and January 1937 he played Banquo in the all-black version of Macbeth staged by Orson Welles and became Welles's friend. He subsequently was Bertram, then Jean Christophe, in William Du Bois's drama Haiti (1938) and filled a minor role in Mamba's Daughters when it went on tour.

Lee's success as an actor led to his most celebrated and controversial stage role--that of Bigger Thomas in Paul Green's dramatization of Richard Wright's powerful novel Native Son. The play opened in March 1941 to sharply divided critical reaction. In December 1942 pressure from numerous sources, including the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Legion of Decency, forced Native Son to close. They were upset by the sympathetic portrayal of a black man driven to murder by racial hatred.

He appeared briefly in William Saroyan's Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning in 1942, and in South Pacific in December 1943. The latter play concerned a cynical black soldier in World War II who had racially based qualms about fighting the Japanese. It was not surprising that a play with such a theme lasted for only five performances. In 1944 Lee made his first motion picture--Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat--during the filming of which he encountered some bigotry. He returned to the stage that year, playing a minor role in Anna Lucasta, the Philip Yordan play about a Polish family, which had been rewritten by Abram Hill of the American Negro Theater to portray a black family.

Lee did not play only "black" parts. He turned down the title role in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, made famous by Paul Robeson and Charles Gilpin, for the role of Caliban in Margaret Webster's production of Shakespeare's Tempest. In the spring of 1944 he appeared in an experimental version of Othello (Act III). Lee later starred as David Bennett in another controversial stage production, Maxine Wood's On Whitman Avenue, of which he was also coproducer. The play, unadorned proselytizing on the theme of discrimination in housing, opened on May 8, 1946, and closed soon afterward. It was good propaganda but "just not good theater. " For Lee, On Whitman Avenue was more than an exercise in acting. The theme lent itself to organized political activity, and he stepped out of his stage role to rally public support for the faltering play. Lee's eye injury kept him out of the armed forces.

During World War II he began to choose roles in plays mixing art with a message in preference to objectively naturalistic vehicles. On Whitman Avenue combined all he wanted to do creatively with a forum for his views of a segregated society. He achieved added celebrity in the fall of 1946, when he reputedly was the first black to play a "white" role. Although the essential artistic value of this achievement was debatable, Lee put on white makeup to portray Daniel de Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi and thus made stage history.

Lee played in the film Body and Soul (1947). He portrayed a has-been black boxer who is the best friend of a Jewish champion. Critics were nearly unanimous in acclaiming Body and Soul, and Lee himself said, "I've found a film role which really satisfies both my artistic and social requirements. "I've been extremely happy about the film's treatment of Negroes and Jews. I consider it to be an adult film. "

Lee's work in the film version of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was not nearly so rewarding. When he went to South Africa in September 1950 to make the picture, he had to pose as the servant of British producer Zoltan Korda--undoubtedly a damaging blow to his self-esteem. On the way home he became ill and had to enter a London hospital for a sympathectomy to treat his high blood pressure. Lee returned to the United States in 1951. The film opened in January 1952 to politely sympathetic reviews, the sympathy aroused by its portrayal of racial segregation more degrading than anything known in the United States. In the meantime there had been the Hollywood purge of Communists in 1947, in which suspected left-wing screenwriters were expelled from the film business and investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Lee was never a member of the Communist party or of any other political organization, but his liberal views were no secret. In Hollywood and New York his politics were judged not by his convictions about racial justice in America but by the company he kept; among his friends were such well-known and outspoken Communists as Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. , a member of the New York City Council, and Richard Wright, author of Native Son.

Lee was also known to be associated with the Civil Rights Congress and other left-wing Harlem organizations. Thus, when he returned from South Africa, he found himself the victim of a whispering campaign about alleged Communist affiliations, and his theatrical career was threatened. Even while Cry, the Beloved Country was playing in New York, he was blacklisted from work in radio, television, and film. As at the end of his boxing career, Lee found himself in severe financial straits. This situation aggravated his poor health, and he died in New York City shortly after his forty-fifth birthday.

Achievements

• Lee pioneered roles for African Americans. He was noted in a 1936 production of Macbeth adapted and directed by Orson Welles. He became a star overnight in his ultimate stage success, "Native Son", an adaptation of Richard Wright's novel staged on Broadway by Orson Welles. He achieved great success in the film "Body and Soul" (1947), in which he costarred with John Garfield. He was also the first black to play a "white" role.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Body and Soul

    (A corrupted boxer sees the light and decides at the last ...)

  • Lifeboat

    (Australia released, PAL/Region 0 DVD: it WILL NOT play on...)

  • Lost Boundaries

    (Scott Carter is a skilled doctor - and a man without pros...)

  • Cry the Beloved Country VHS

    (VERSION VHS Nov 16th 1951. In the back country of South ...)

Views

Quotations: Lee claimed that boxing was his first love: "Boxing is beautiful. Boxing is rhythm, grace, and finesse. To me, it is the highest expression of skill and science. "

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• One critic said about his role in "Othello": "He lacks the towering stature and organlike tones of Mr. Robeson, and he has a good deal to learn about speaking blank verse. "
  
  Walter F. White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a confidant of Lee's, said of the actor: "Although America has denied him, because of his color and of its fear, the right to earn a living at his profession in the hour of his greatest triumph, Mr. Lee doggedly held to his faith in the ultimate perfectibility of democracy and his determination to use his vast talents for the abolition of bigotry" (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 15, 1952).

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  Boxing

Connections

Lee married Juanita Waller Lee in December 1925. They had one son. In 1951 he married Frances Pollack.

Father:

James Cornelius Canegata

Mother:

Lydia Whaley Canegata

Spouse:

Juanita Waller Lee

Spouse:

Frances Pollack Lee

References

• Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee