Actor Earle Hyman, best known, if not altogether justly, for playing Grandfather Huxtable on The Cosby Show from 1984 to 1992, died November 17 at the age of 91.
Hyman, according to the New York Times, “paid the bills” with television gigs to underwrite his work in the theater, where his career of more than six decades included Broadway appearances in plays by Beckett and Pinter, Albee and O’Neill, Ibsen and Shakespeare. He was in the cohort of young black actors who sought to open the repertoire to more equitable and imaginative casting.
It turns out that not the least of Hyman’s accomplishments was being the first American to act in Norwegian to Norwegians, playing Othello in Bergen in 1963. He spent several months a year in Scandinavia for five decades, telling the Times that he appreciated the unimportance of race there. In the United States, he said in 1991, there was still a question when black actors were cast in roles that had been traditionally white. “Just the fact that people still ask that question—should we or shouldn’t we—proves that things have not come a long way.” He added that in Norway he had “played a Norwegian archbishop and no one has raised a question.”
The Scrapbook can’t help noticing that the idea of color-blind casting has run into some trouble recently. White actors playing Asian or Hispanic roles are now regularly decried as invidious beneficiaries of “whitewashing.” In some ways casting has become not color blind but color obsessed.
Can you blame us for wishing for a bit of Hyman’s wisdom, perhaps delivered, befitting his experience, as grandfatherly advice?
