The long career of the actor Earl Cameron, who has died aged 102, mirrored changes in both British cinema and society. His debut, playing a West Indian merchant seaman, was in the ostensibly modest film noir Pool of London (1951).
In retrospect it can be seen as a milestone in its depiction of a relationship between a black worker and a young white woman – the first time the subject had been sensitively handled in a British film.
The opening of Earl Cameron's Guardian obituary (he died last year) tells us of his social importance, but it's worth emphasising that he was a very fine actor too,
Cameron was interviewed by Dylan Cave at the British Film Institute in 2015 for this video, when he was a stripling of 97.
As well as Pool of London, Cameron talks about making The Heart Within (one of my key children-and-bombsite films) with James Hayter and a young David Hemmings.
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