revolutionary situation, and we get involved in revolutionary situations all the time.”
A long marriage is revolutionary!
According to their interview with The Guardian, they both speak not of white culture but of “the dominant culture”, and navigating that as Black people.
Have the couple ever felt like they’ve had to choose between fully being themselves and the wants of the fickle showbiz world, an industry he entered relatively late (his big break, in Pulp Fiction, came at age 45)? “No,” Jackson says authoritatively. “We don’t compromise who we are to do the things we do.
It’s imperative that we be who we are. It’s not like we’ve never heard: ‘You’ll never work in this town again.’”
Richardson laughs. “Well you have – I haven’t!” she says, compared with Jackson.
“I was maybe 15, in high school. I had a great mentor/teacher, Georgia Allen, who took a few of us to Spelman College, to be a part of children’s theater.
I did theater at Spelman until I graduated from there, and I got to work with such luminous actresses as Diana Sands in ‘Macbeth.’”
“Atlanta was a welcoming presence for a lot of artists.; They called it ‘the Mecca of the South.’ I got to see the Negro Ensemble Company, Cicely Tyson, Geraldine Page, Ruby Dee, all onstage. With cinema, all of us watched Bette Davis. It’s horrible to say, but she’s why I started smoking!”
“And then Diahann Carroll on TV [who starred in the 1968 series “Julia”] made everything seem possible. I never thought it impossible to be an actor.
I was a Southern colored girl, and part of the Black Power movement. I was always