Frank Silvera - Career

Career

Silvera was an African-American actor born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Spanish Jewish father and Jamaican mother. His family later emigrated to the United States, settling in Boston, where Silvera attended English High School and Northeastern Law School. Silvera later studied acting at the Actors Studio.

Due to his light complexion, Silvera was cast in a wide variety of ethnic roles in films, and was cast without regard to his color in the theater. He played the father of Ben Gazzara and Anthony Franciosa on Broadway in Michael V. Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain (a role portrayed by Lloyd Nolan on screen). Until the 1960s, Silvera played "white" characters on Broadway, such as his Tony-nominated performance as the father Monsieur Duval in The Lady of the Camellias in 1963. He threw off color-blind casting in 1965, when he financed his own production of The Amen Corner by the African-American writer James Baldwin. He was the founder of The Theatre of Being, a Los Angeles-based theater dedicated to helping black actors get a foothold in show business.

In films and on television, he was also cast without regard to his color, though mostly as Latinos, even appearing as a Polynesian in the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando, with whom Silvera co-starred in Viva Zapata!, One-Eyed Jacks and The Appaloosa as Mexican characters. He appeared in two films directed by Stanley Kubrick, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer's Kiss (1955) as either "white" or racially indeterminate. He also appeared as a Mexican bandit in the 1967 Martin Ritt Western classic, Hombre, based on the Elmore Leonard novel.

At a lecture at the University of Maryland, while appearing in a production of King Lear, he told of his attempt to get a part in a TV drama as a black elevator operator. The producer rejected him as being too light-skinned. He left the producer's office, then returned. "Am I light enough to play one of the white parts?" He got the job.