Career
In 1951 Connor was responsible for bringing the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra - TASPO - to the Festival of Britain. In 1956, he recorded the first Manchester United Football Club song, "The Manchester United Calypso". That same year, he and his wife Pearl (1924–2005) set up the Edric Connor Agency, representing black actors, dancers, writers and musicians, which later, in the 1970s, she ran under the name of the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Agency. In 1963 they set up the Negro Theatre Workshop, one of the UK's first black theatre groups.
Connor appeared on stage in Summer Song at London's Princess Theatre in 1956. In 1958 he became the first black actor to perform for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, playing Gower in Pericles. Connor acted in a total of 18 films and was best noted for his role as Daggoo in Moby Dick (1956).
Connor also co-starred with Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, and Jack Lemmon in the 1957 film Fire Down Below, directed by Robert Parrish, playing the character Jimmy Jean, who was the third man on the "boat-for-hire" along with Mitchum and Lemmon.
In 1952, with his band "Edric Connor and the Caribbeans" he recorded the album Songs from Jamaica. This included the song "Day Dah Light", which portrayed the hard life of Caribbean field workers. The song was later recorded by Jamaican folk singer Louise Bennett in 1954, and was later rewritten by Irving Burgie and William Attaway in 1955. The version performed by legendary singer Harry Belafonte became popularly known as "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)", reaching number five on the Billboard charts in 1957, and was even featured in the popular film directed by Tim Burton, Beetlejuice, in 1988.
Connor's acting for television included roles in the espionage series Danger Man: as the character Thompson in "Deadline" (1962, the final episode of the first series, which unusually featured an almost all-black cast), and memorably as opposition leader Dr Manudu in the series 2 episode entitled "The Galloping Major" (first aired on 3 November 1964).
Read more about this topic: Edric Connor
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