Very quietly, Danny Glover is suddenly the most in-demand serious black actor in the movies today.
”When we were casting for my partner in the film,” says Mel Gibson, Glover`s costar in the new police thriller ”Lethal Weapon,” ”the character originally was written as a white guy. Together with Dick Donner, the director, we started going down a list of names, starting with Nick Nolte. We kept on going and then somebody said, `Danny Glover,` and we all thought for a second and said, `Yeah.` ”
A lot of people are saying `Yeah` to Danny Glover these days.
In ”The Color Purple” Glover played the controversial character of Mister, transformed from a macho brute into a caring human being at the end of the picture.
In ”Places in the Heart” Glover played a thieving farmer who helped Sally Field establish and hold together her farm.
In his lesser screen roles, he has played two characters-in-transition:
the killer-cop in ”Witness” and the abused champion of the browbeaten in the western ”Silverado.”
Glover, 39, said he revels in playing characters who experience broad changes, and when he tells you a bit of his life story it`s easy to see why.
”I attended San Francisco State University in the late 1960s during the Free Speech Movement protest. I joined the Black Student Union and, later, the Black Panther Party. And when I look back on those days, I`m glad I took a stand, but I also realize that I could have become one of the many casualties of the bickering within those organizations.
”I had close friends who challenged the Black Panther Party line and ended up as dead meat. That could have been me. I had friends that took too many drugs and ended wandering the street in rags. That could have been me, too.”
What kept Glover together then and now, he said, is his family, both his elders and the family he has built on his own.
”I can trace my (living) family back on my mother`s side all the way to my grandparents who are both in their 90s and still live on a farm in Georgia. I visit them every year. They were upwardly mobile people, tenant farmers who eventually bought their own farm. They saw Glover`s film debut on videocassette.
”They laughed when they saw me picking cotton in `Places in the Heart,`
because they knew I wasn`t very good at it and because I was always afraid of the mule at their place.
”I`m also lucky to have enjoyed the constant support of my parents (his mother and father are postal workers in San Francisco), especially my mother, who was the hardest-working person I`ve known. She just told me to be good at whatever I chose to do, and I`ve done a lot of things.
”I didn`t become committed to being a full-time actor until nine years ago, when I turned 30.”
Before that Glover, an economics major, received a fellowship in 1971 to work with the Berkeley, Calif., planning commission on zoning.
For the next five years he worked in various city and county jobs in San Francisco, specializing in housing and educational programs.
At the end of those years, the mid-`70s, Glover participated in improvisational acting groups, including weekend performances of the Black Actors` Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
`I slowly and reluctantly realized that I was bored with my jobs with the city,” he said. ”My wife and I bought a house in Haight-Ashbury in 1975, and we saw the neighborhood start to change. That`s when we had our daughter, Mandisa, now 11.
”I wasn`t making a lot of money at the time, but I realized that something was happening inside of me. I guess I was becoming committed to acting.
”I performed in (South African) Athol Fugard`s play `The Blood Knot.`
And I found in this beautiful piece of political poetry a more human way of saying the same things I had performed as part of the more strident, agit prop theater in college.
”Here was a real play with characters and not just positions,” Glover continued. ”And in Fugard`s writing I found someone who was saying what I thought of the world and how it should be (free of apartheid). His statement became my statement. His humanity and justice became what I wanted.”
Glover became a specialist in Fugard`s South African-based plays, including ”The Island” and ”Sizwe Banzi is Dead.”
”There weren`t a lot of black American actors doing South African dialects at the time, and I became very good at it. People from South Africa told me I reminded them of someone they knew because of the way I talked and moved.”
It was those early Fugard plays that earned Glover his breakthrough role on stage: the lead in Fugard`s celebrated ”Master Harold and the Boys,”
first at Yale University`s repertory theater and later on Broadway.
In the audience one night was writer-director Robert Benton (”Kramer vs. Kramer”) who would remember Glover`s performance when it came time to cast the role of the black farmer in ”Places in the Heart.”
”There`s a lot of luck in this business,” Glover said. ”If Benton hadn`t seen me, would I have been in `Places in the Heart`? And that`s the role that led to playing Mister.”
Of course the role of Mister embroiled Glover in a controversy that he knows will follow him for many years, with accusations that the role and the film were racist in terms of stereotyping black males as wife-beaters.
”In a way now,” Glover said, ”I`m glad there was controversy. It got people talking about the issue, which is good. I don`t think the film was racist. On the contrary, I think Mister`s character holds out hope for change at the end. The one valid point (of the protestors) is that there isn`t enough diversity in films about black people. But you can`t blame this movie for that.”
And what did his maternal grandparents think of the film that was set in a time and place not far from where they live?
”They`ve never seen the film,” Glover said. ”There isn`t a movie theater in their town and they`re 30 miles from the nearest big city. I tried to get them a tape of the film. I even called Steven (Spielberg, the producer- director), and he said that no tape existed.
(That sounds far-fetched, but Warner Bros. and Spielberg have decided they have a classic film that was hurt by protest and can still make additional millions at the box-office before it is sold for home use.)
”I suspect,” Glover said, ”that my grandparents would understand the movie. I remember my grandmother telling me lots of stories that were similar to what went on in the movie. The same applies to some of my aunts.
”You see,” he continued, ”I loved Alice Walker`s book before there ever was a movie. And I like the writing of most black women authors, including Toni Morrison. I think black women see black men better than we see ourselves. And I don`t feel threatened by that.”
Right now Glover has no reason to feel threatened by anything. He enjoys a warm and comfortable and fun-filled homelife in his native San Francisco. He hasn`t gone Hollywood.
”I drive a 1983 Toyota Tercel. And we still live in the same house we bought in 1975. I`m not living beyond my means and that allows me not to feel any rush to work. You spend about four months working on a film, and I don`t want it to be a waste of time.”
Glover`s stable homelife is reflected in ”Lethal Weapon,” his new film with Mel Gibson. Unlike most pictures, the black man has been given a family and the white guy is the loner.
Much of the enjoyment of the film is contained in early scenes in Glover`s home where he is comically entranced by the budding beauty of his daughter, who of course, just thinks of him as an old man.
”That was easy to play, because that`s what`s going on in my own home right now,” Glover said. ”I`m totally, rapturously in love with my daughter, but she`s embarrassed to have me around. I found out the hard way that she hasn`t told her friends that I`m an actor.
”One day I met her at school wearing some warm-up clothes, but one of the kids recognized me and asked for my autograph. Mandisa quickly came over to me and said, `Dad, you better wait downstairs.` Well, there`s some of that in the movie.”
What also is special in ”Lethal Weapon” is a portrait of an upper-middle-class black family.
”I know, I know,” Glover said. ”That`s so rare. That`s the real shame of American movies. I was sitting listening to my mother-in-law the other day and she was really cracking me up with some stories. And I thought to myself, `Why can`t people like her be in a movie?` ”
