Godfrey Cambridge - Stage and Screen Career

Stage and Screen Career

While pursuing an acting career Cambridge supported himself with a variety of jobs, including "cab driver, bead-sorter, ambulance driver, gardener, judo instructor, and clerk for the New York City Housing Authority," as well as cleaning airplanes and making popcorn bunnies.

Cambridge's first role was as a bartender in the off-Broadway play Take a Giant Step. He made his Broadway debut in the original production of Herman Wouk's 1957 play Nature's Way. Cambridge received a 1962 Tony Award nomination as part of the original cast of Purlie Victorious, a play written by and starring Ossie Davis; he was featured in an opening-night cast that also included Ruby Dee, Alan Alda, Sorrell Booke, Roger C. Carmel, Helen Martin, and Beah Richards.

Godfrey's memorable film roles include Watermelon Man, in which he plays the lead character, a white bigot who one day wakes up and discovers his skin color has turned black, and The President's Analyst, where he plays a depressed government agent. He also had a starring role in the 1970 Ossie Davis adaptation of the Chester Himes novel Cotton Comes to Harlem, as well as its 1972 sequel, Come Back, Charleston Blue. Godfrey made an impressive cameo appearance in director Sidney Lumet's Bye Bye Braverman as a Yiddish speaking NYC cab driver involved in a car collision with the main protagonists, and another as a gay underworld figure in the 1975 Pam Grier vehicle Friday Foster. Cambridge had a starring role in Beware! The Blob, a sequel to The Blob. Sometime between 1972 and 1976 he produced and hosted a drug-awareness film called Dead is Dead. The film depicted an uncensored look at the downside of drug-use, showing actual drug users injecting drugs and going through withdrawals.

Cambridge appeared on several network television programs, including Car 54 Where Are You? ("The Curse of the Snitkins"), The Dick Van Dyke Show ("The Man From My Uncle"), I Spy ("Court of the Lion"), and Police Story ("Year of the Dragon"). He also had a small speaking part as a member of Sgt. Bilko's platoon in The Phil Silvers Show, 1957 episode "Boys Town". Cambridge gave an acclaimed performance alongside Tom Bosley in the episode "Make Me Laugh" of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, a story about a failed comedian who looks to a genie for a quick fix to success; the episode was directed by Steven Spielberg. He perhaps reached his largest television audience in a series of comical commercials for Jockey brand underwear.

He later appeared in Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show, giving a performance that earned him an Obie Award in 1961. Four years later he did a stock version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.