Actress Denise Nicholas makes her living on television these days by portraying life in a sleepy Southern town jarred awake by the civil rights movement of the `60s.
It`s a world she knows personally. Decades before her featured role in CBS` ”In the Heat of the Night” series, Nicholas was in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama, performing in free theater, working in voter registration efforts and experiencing the tumult and the terror of those days. She learned how it felt to have a gun aimed at her head.
Today Nicholas, who is in her 40s, is an ebullient, passionate woman. One of the first African-American actresses to hold a featured role in a 1970s television series-”Room 222”-she also co-starred with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier in a couple of movies. She said she`s enjoying her current role as city councilwoman Harriet DeLong in ”In the Heat of the Night.” The character currently is involved in a May-December interracial romance with the police chief, played by Carroll O`Connor.
That that relationship can thrive today on prime time television is a sign of the change that has occurred in TV`s point of view on American culture. But in the spring of 1964, Nicholas could have hoped for but not foreseen that as she left her home state of Michigan to join a theatrical company was being organized to tour the South.
That ”was an electric, absolutely electric time, all over the country,” Nicholas said of the months following the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King`s speech at the Lincoln Memorial there.
Nicholas heard about about the Free Southern Theater from a campus activist at the University of Michigan, where she was a student. The Free Southern Theater was a racially integrated, touring professional theatrical group that would perform in communities in the South in which black people had never seen live theater. Nicholas wrote to the coordinators of the troupe, and they invited her to join them in Jackson, Miss. Originally, Nicholas went down to be a script reader, but the group wanted her to perform in a play.
After that summer, she returned to Ann Arbor, but soon realized her mind and her spirit were elsewhere. Much to her parents` dismay (”They were crushed-they were terrified”), she went back to Jackson that winter, and remained there through late 1966.
The actors stayed in the homes of people, Nicholas said, who often sat up all night on their porches with shotguns to protect the visitors from people who strongly resented the integrated troupe`s presence. The theater group performed free, sometimes in churches, sometimes outdoors on the edges of fields. They were advised often to leave town, Nicholas said.
There was a fundamental difference between the visitors and their hosts, she said. ”We always could leave-these people couldn`t. So those who were dependent on the power structure as it existed there for employment or for services of any kind were ostracized” after they played host to the Northerners.
”We didn`t go through that,” she recalled. ”But we were shot at, we had bombs thrown at the stage and were arrested without anyone knowing where we were.”
Nicholas` touring in the South ended when one of the troupe`s benefactors, actress Viveca Lindfors, invited her to New York to work in a production of ”Three Boards and a Passion,” in which they later toured the Midwest together. That led to a contract in 1967 for the first season of New York`s Negro Ensemble Company. Within a year, she won a leading role in ”Room 222,” a high school-centered comedy drama.
California is her home now, but Nicholas holds firmly to her Midwestern roots. She was born in Detroit. Her mother, Louise Burgen, was an
administrative assistant at the University of Michigan`s graduate school of public administration and her stepfather, Robert Burgen, was the head of probation and parole at Milan Federal Correctional Institution. When Denise enrolled at Michigan, she contemplated a career in law or anything that would ”help black people in some way,” she said.
When her role in ”Room 222” ended in 1974, Nicholas` career slowed. She had burned her bridges to the Negro Ensemble Company, where bitterness lingered over her leaving after only one season for television.
Nicholas did occasional work on TV-dramatic series and a couple of movies, ”Let`s Do It Again” and ”A Piece of the Action,” with Cosby and Poitier. But movie work was limited.
At the outset of the `80s, her acting career was halted. And she took it hard.
But Nicholas` career problems were put in perspective when personal tragedy invaded her family`s life in 1980. Her half-sister, Michele Burgen, 26, an assistant editor at Ebony magazine in Chicago, went to New York for a job interview and was murdered at LaGuardia Airport, a crime that has never been solved.
Nicholas (who has one surviving sibling, a brother) was traumatized by her sister`s death. She says now that her difficulty in recovering emotionally from her sister`s death was an unanticipated aspect of the ”shift of energy” that happens to any family at such a moment.
”The focus in situations like that is on the mother, because the mother lost a child,” Nicholas explained. ”Well, nobody pays much attention to the siblings.”
She went into therapy, but for a while she also drank excessively, took diet pills and became reclusive. In 1981, she married Jim Hill, a sportscaster (she`d been married briefly twice before, years earlier). The marriage lasted five years. Because of her emotional instability at the time, Nicholas said that marriage ”didn`t have a chance.
”I remember going on auditions during that time and feeling like there was a veil over me. I couldn`t see clearly, nor was anyone able to see me clearly. If you`re a take-charge person like I am (ordinarily), people tend not to think you have a problem. They figure you can handle it. And a lot of people in my family always figured I could handle (grief) because I`ve always been strong. But I wasn`t handling it at all, not at all-none of it.”
She enrolled at the University of Southern California, earning a bachelor`s degree in 1987 and starting work on a master`s degree. She acted at the Crossroads Theater, a black company in New Brunswick, N.J. And she began writing a play for Crossroads, a fantasy about a meeting between Rosa Parks, who in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, and another black woman who, nearly a century earlier in San Francisco, was ejected from a trolley.
In 1989, the second season of ”In the Heat of the Night” (based on the 1967 Oscar-winning movie), Carroll O`Connor suggested that a black city councilwoman be added to the cast. He suggested a Denise Nicholas-type for the role. He knew Nicholas because his wife Nancy had worked on various Los Angeles charities with her.
Gene Reynolds, director of the episode introducing the Harriet DeLong character, had been producer of ”Room 222.” She heard about the opening, asked for a meeting with studio executives and won the role.
”Harriet represents what happened in the South after the `60s,”
Nicholas said. ”She`s a black elected official, which is extremely important to me. That`s No. 1. No. 2, as an actress, what I like about her is that she has a professional life and a personal life. That gives me the opportunity to go through the gamut of changes and to grow. … And she has this relationship with the chief, which opens up other areas of drama and conflict”-which will go up another romantic notch this season.
While Nicholas` character is intertwined with the `60s, the actress who plays her now is preoccupied by events of the `90s-particularly the Los Angeles riots that erupted a couple of miles from her home. She is angered that ”the psychology of oppressed people is to eat themselves, to turn their rage in on themselves more often than not,” and by what she terms ”the virus of self-destruction that`s everywhere and that`s got to stop.
”I was anxious because I have a mother here and a nephew. He house-sits when I`m gone. Every time he walks out that door, I`m nervous. He`s working, but he`s young. I`m afraid for him because there`s so much killing in the streets and because the police are so obnoxious as far as young black men are concerned.”
What buoys her is the sense that she is accomplishing something tangible as an actress and as a writer (one of her ”In the Heat of the Night” scripts was aired last season, and another two have been shot and scheduled for early `93. But she said she`s about five years behind schedule-the five years that followed Michele`s death.
She says she would like to marry again, but she has grown used to the routine of her present lifestyle.
”My life works for me-it really works very well,” she said. ”I`m able now to be more creative than ever before. There`s a system that`s set up that is allowing me to fulfill my dreams. What frightens me is anything interfering with that at this point. So that makes me a little skittish. I don`t want to lose this energy and this track that I`m on because I worked so hard for it for so long.
”So I want to find someone who likes that part of me and is willing to allow that part of me to be free and to flower.
”Because it`s incredible now. I have to pinch myself sometimes.
`Nicholas, you`re working!”`
