Background
Beah Richards was born on July 12, 1920, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States. Her mother was a seamstress and an advocate of the Parent-Teacher Association, and her father was a Baptist minister.
2000
Beah Richards with her Emmy award
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
Beah Richards
(The only way to make a bid for a girl's equality is to cl...)
The only way to make a bid for a girl's equality is to climb right up to the uppermost bough of the very tallest tree. The dynamic ode to girl power was written by noted Afro-American actor, poet, and playwright Beach E. Richards.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416902643/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0
2006
(A police psychiatrist attempts to find a mugger obsessed ...)
A police psychiatrist attempts to find a mugger obsessed with the need to seek out lonely women and slash their faces.
https://www.amazon.com/Mugger-Kent-Smith/dp/B009TMV7KW/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Mugger&qid=1580368448&sr=8-1
1958
(Academy Awards went to Best Actress Anne Bancroft and Bes...)
Academy Awards went to Best Actress Anne Bancroft and Best Supporting Actress Patty Duke for their moving portrayals of Annie Sullivan and her remarkable blind and deaf pupil, Helen Keller.
https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Worker-Anne-Bancroft/dp/B07N2P8NSX/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=The+Miracle+Worker&qid=1580368551&sr=8-2
1962
(Drama of a ruthless Southern opportunist who tries to buy...)
Drama of a ruthless Southern opportunist who tries to buy his cousin's land, and when thwarted, brings several tragedies to the lives of his loved ones.
https://www.amazon.com/Hurry-Sundown-Michael-Caine/dp/B008GJUYW6/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Hurry+Sundown&qid=1580368660&sr=8-1
1967
(Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier are compelling as an unlik...)
Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier are compelling as an unlikely crime-fighting pair in this five-time Oscar winning (including Best Picture) murder mystery set in a steamy southern town.
https://www.amazon.com/Heat-Night-Sidney-Poitier/dp/B00HV2OQD2/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=In+the+Heat+of+the+Night&qid=1580368723&sr=8-3
1967
(Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star as parents perpl...)
Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star as parents perplexed about their daughter's engagement to a black doctor.
https://www.amazon.com/Guess-Coming-Dinner-Spencer-Tracy/dp/B008Y704R0/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Guess+Who%27s+Coming+to+Dinner&qid=1580368764&sr=8-1
1967
(A drama that tackles agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces...)
A drama that tackles agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. Gould plays a man who fears leaving his New York apartment; his only contact with the world is through the phone and delivery services.
https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Out-Elliott-Gould/dp/B005TMXZKG/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Inside+Out+1986&qid=1580369084&sr=8-1
1986
(A mentally challenged man gets help from a sociopathic wo...)
A mentally challenged man gets help from a sociopathic woman when he tries to reunite with his dying father, who disowned him years earlier.
https://www.amazon.com/Homer-Eddie-James-Belushi/dp/B07R95GCJY/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Homer+and+Eddie&qid=1580369248&sr=8-1
1989
(On a difficult journey to find freedom, Sethe is confront...)
On a difficult journey to find freedom, Sethe is confronted by the secrets that have haunted her for years. Then, an old friend from out of her past unexpectedly reenters her life. With his help, Sethe may finally be able to rediscover who she is.
https://www.amazon.com/Beloved-Oprah-Winfrey/dp/B00C4Q0K58/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Beloved&qid=1580369376&sr=8-2
1998
(Sanford and Son debuted in 1972 and was a ratings hit thr...)
Sanford and Son debuted in 1972 and was a ratings hit through its entire run of six seasons. Redd Foxx was already a star in the comedy world before he took on the role of cranky, scheming junk dealer Fred Sanford. Fred and his son Lamont (Demond Wilson) work together in the salvage yard and have a hilariously rocky, no-holds-barred father-son relationship.
https://www.amazon.com/Ep-62-Hello-Cousin-Goodbye/dp/B01GKJ4BUY/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=beah+richards&qid=1580369805&s=digital-text&sr=1-6-catcorr
Beah Richards was born on July 12, 1920, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States. Her mother was a seamstress and an advocate of the Parent-Teacher Association, and her father was a Baptist minister.
Even at a young age, people said Richards was destined for the theater. At the time, such a career seemed very far away. Vicksburg did not have a theater then, and if it did have one, blacks would not have been allowed. Richards grew up in an environment of racial hostility. She was not allowed to check books out of the public library and, while on her way to school, she had even been stoned by white children.
Richards graduated from Dillard University in New Orleans in 1948 and moved to New York City in 1950 to begin a career as a stage actress.
Richards's career began at a time when roles for black actors were becoming marginally less stereotypical compared with the pre-war years when comic characters or minor parts as spear carriers or domestic servants were the norm. Since she was a straight actress, not an entertainer, Richards never achieved star status, and specialized in feisty character roles, usually older than her years, notably indomitable matriarchs.
A move to New York in the early 1950s, to play the role of the grandmother in Take a Giant Step, boosted her career. When the British director Philip Leacock filmed the play in 1959, she reprised the role, thus escaping the typecasting that might have followed her screen debut as a maid in The Mugger (1958).
In 1959 she was the understudy to Claudia McNeil as Lena Younger in the original Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun and went on to play the role in the 25th-anniversary production of the play at the Yale Repertory Theater. Lena Younger was, in fact, an archetypal Richards character, a woman who bravely moves from a slum into a lily-white community in Chicago. With the conviction of a Rosa Parks, she leads her family into block-busting not as an act of revolution but as her birthright.
Theatre work proved easier to obtain. Television was still largely a closed shop to black actors and, apart from repeating the stage role of Viney in The Miracle Worker when it was filmed in 1962, big-screen work also proved elusive in the early years. This was to change as Hollywood timidly began to show a concern for race in entertainment movies, rather than simply those designated as "problem pictures".
Richards enjoyed three character parts, beginning with Rose, the mother to Robert Hooks in Otto Preminger's deep south movie Hurry Sundown (1966). It was hokum, but it cast her alongside Michael Caine and Jane Fonda. In the markedly better social thriller In the Heat of the Night (1967), she shared the screen with Sidney Poitier, Hollywood's leading black actor; later that year she did so again in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, this time playing Poitier's mother, despite being two years his junior.
Although the film is sometimes criticized as ponderous and simplistic today, its theme of interracial marriage between a young black doctor and the daughter of seemingly liberal white parents provoked controversy and interest in 1967, and Richards' success as the supportive Mrs. Prentice gained her considerable attention. Poitier was to be the first of many screen sons: she later mothered James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope (1970), Danny Glover in And the Children Shall Weep (1984) and Eriq La Salle as the irascible Dr. Benton in ER.
From 1967 onward, Richards was rarely short of acting work. On television she starred for two years in The Bill Cosby Show, and went on to appear in a number of other notable series; Hill Street Blues, Murder She Wrote and the mini-series Roots: The Next Generations (1979). TV movies included Just an Old Sweet Song (1976) and A Christmas Without Snow (1980).
Richards also enjoyed success as a writer with One Is a Crowd, and A Black Woman Speaks and Other Poems. Adapting these for the stage, she went on tour with a show called An Evening With Beah Richards. Further stage roles included James Baldwin's The Amen Corner and a Lincoln Centre revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, directed by Mike Nichols. She also wrote plays and poetry, and one of her poems, Keep Climbing, Girls, was published as an illustrated children’s book in 2006.
Subsequent films included Mahogany (1975), Big Shots (1987), Homer & Eddie (1989) and Drugstore Cowboy (1989). For her last cinema role, in Beloved (1998) as Baby Suggs, she was nominated as an outstanding supporting actress in a motion picture.
(The only way to make a bid for a girl's equality is to cl...)
2006(Academy Awards went to Best Actress Anne Bancroft and Bes...)
1962(Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier are compelling as an unlik...)
1967(Drama of a ruthless Southern opportunist who tries to buy...)
1967(A mentally challenged man gets help from a sociopathic wo...)
1989(A police psychiatrist attempts to find a mugger obsessed ...)
1958(Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star as parents perpl...)
1967(On a difficult journey to find freedom, Sethe is confront...)
1998(Ivan Reitman brings you Big Shots, a slam-bang comedy-adv...)
1987(A young black man raised in a white neighborhood feels il...)
1959(Matt Dillon and his not-so-merry band of junkies rob phar...)
1989(Two Georgia boys ignore their racial differences to team up.)
1972(A drama that tackles agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces...)
1986(Sanford and Son debuted in 1972 and was a ratings hit thr...)
Richards was raised in a Baptist family, her father was a Baptist minister. Religion played a very important role in her life. She once said: "I always relate the theater to the church. There is the sharpness of the image, the poetry. And like the church, the theater must always be an exploration for truth."
Richards was a lifelong liberal Democrat and a Civil Rights activist. Because of her ties to black activists and Communist Party leaders, the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept files on Richards from 1951 to 1972.
In addition to her lengthy acting career, Richards was active in the civil rights movement with others such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. She also published poetry. A Black Woman Speaks (1974) is a collection of 14 poems. In the preface, she spoke of the need to "see how it is that blacks and whites agree so little culturally." Her views on the impact of a segregated society and on the prejudices against women are clear in her verse. She speaks to white women, urging them to remember "history," and she cites women of both races as victims of white supremacists.
Quotations: "There are a lot of movies out there that I would hate to be paid to do, some real demeaning, real woman-denigrating stuff. It is up to women to change their roles. They are going to have to write the stuff and do it. And they will."
Beah Richards was a part of the Actors’ Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, Congress of Racial Equality and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Beah Richards was described as a quiet, soft-spoken person. Most of her friends and fellow performers felt that Richards never received the recognition that she was due, partly because of the standards of the time and the roles into which she was cast. Richards rarely complained but went about her life-giving the best of herself in any performance. However, in 1973 she spoke at a Boston University conference on "Black Images in Film: Stereotyping and Self-Perception as Viewed by Black Actresses." Commenting that the best attack against stereotyping is simply not going to those films.
Richards had no fear of speaking out at on her commitment to truth and freedom at political rallies.
Quotes from others about the person
"I think Beah’s favorite role was being a free spirit. Without question, she was hurt…. But she died without regrets." - LisaGay Hamilton
Beah Richards was married for three years to an African-American sculptor, Hugh Harrell Jr., but they divorced.