BERMUDIAN Earl Cameron is the Happy Warrior of the British film industry, his grace enduring, his influence constant and his intent clearly to persevere to the last. Now 90-years-old, he continues to fight an inspirational rear-guard action against time, vanquishing its every attempt to encroach on both his gifts and his energies. Most recently appearing opposite Helen Mirren in her Oscar-winning turn in The Queen, Cameron is himself being garlanded this week. He is the recipient of the Bermuda International Film Festival’s Prospero Award for lifetime achievement - an honour named after the magus in Shakespeare’s Bermuda-inspired Tempest.

In this most overtly theatrical of Shakespearean plays, Prospero is often held to be a surrogate if not for the playwright himself then certainly for the dramatist’s art and the actor’s craft.

Prospero is the master of illusions, of what amounts to magical stagecraft. He uses his island lair as a type of supernatural theatre in the round, staging “insubstantial pageants” - essentially plays within the play - that have profound transformative effects on the other characters in>The Tempest <$>.

The “visions” Prospero conjures up work a kind of spiritual alchemy, transmuting the protagonists’ baser emotions, desires and ambitions just as skillfully executed drama can radically alter audiences’ feelings and, at times, thinking.

There’s a happy symmetry at work here.

For almost 50 years ago Earl Cameron indirectly contributed to bringing about this type of wholesale change in Bermuda. The subtle but all-pervasive influence of his art helped to initiate precisely the type of metamorphosis on this island that Prospero sets in motion in a more deliberately manipulative, stage-managed manner.

There are a number of reasons why the flashpoint for the peaceful 1959 boycott that ended officially sanctioned segregation in Bermuda was the cinemas rather than the restaurants or hotels.

One of those reasons was Earl Cameron.

While the cinemas were the leading source of public entertainment in those days, a boycott of the hotels, the engine of Bermuda’s hospitality-based economy, would have had a more direct and immediate impact on the segregationist policies then in place.

But there was a half-conscious symbolism involved in the Progressive Group’s choice of the Bermuda General Theatres cinemas as the target of a boycott (those owned by competing outfits never had segregated seating policies).

In recent years black Bermudians had seen Earl Cameron reflect their self-image and self-esteem in the mirror of popular culture.

At the island’s cinemas, where his flickering image was projected 40-feet tall across the screens, Cameron became something far more significant than just a matinee idol for Bermudian blacks: he became a meaningful model, a symbol of hope, an avatar of their own aspirations.

One of the few blacks routinely playing major roles in either the British or American film industry, Cameron’s growing popularity with international audiences - and his urbane, dignified performances at a time when eye-rolling, shucking-and-jiving stereotypes were not uncommon - provided black Bermudians with an icon just as they were embarking on their own journey for recognition and full civic rights.

“It is perhaps difficult for members who are not coloured to appreciate the indignity which this simple matter of segregated seating has on the coloured community,” Parliamentarian Arnold Francis told the House of Assembly in the midst of the boycott.

He might have added it was also perhaps difficult for Bermudians who were not black to appreciate the indignity of not being viewed so much with hostility by their white countrymen but rather not to be viewed at all - to be deemed, for all practical purposes, invisible.

Cameron provided black Bermudians not only with a heightened profile that could not be ignored by the community at large but also with some timely morale-boosting in his choice of roles.

Indeed, one of his earliest films unapologetically addressed the question of the colour bar head-on, its taboo-challenging plot a cause for hand-wringing among members of the Bermudian Establishment.

Pool of Lond$>, being shown at BIFF during its retrospective tribute to Mr. Cameron, was produced in 1950 by Ealing Studios, the undisputed master jewellers in a British film industry then largely limited to making cut-glass knock-offs of superior Hollywood movies.

Pool of Lon<$> was directed by Basil Dearden, an acutely intelligent and socially conscious filmmaker. Dearden understood not only the film medium’s unrivalled ability to address the contemporary ethical dilemmas that existed in an upended, post-war British cultural landscape but also its social responsibility to do so.

In Pool of London, the director made a morality tale centred around racial politics in the guise of a routine heist picture, featuring Cameron as a merchant seaman in the London docklands who is drawn into both a diamond smuggling plot and a then forbidden love affair with a white woman, Pat (Susan Shaw).

Cameron’s first major film role demonstrated him to be an actor with an extensive, note-perfect range. His Johnny is a complex, multi-faceted character - during the course of the film he goes from persecuted stranger in a strange land, to shy lover, to drunken barroom brawler when his tamped-down emotions briefly explode into violence.

The British Film Institute calls Cameron’s performancePool of London “extraordinarily affecting ... arguably his finest”. It proved to be a breakthrough role not only for Cameron but other black actors in the United Kingdom, previously consigned to roles as menials or comic relief if they were cast at all, who were caught up in the powerful cultural slipstream of his success.

But in the country of Cameron’s birth the film was subjected to what might politely be termed censorship by omission: it simply wasn’t booked by Bermudian theatres because its plot - touching on racial prejudice and a burgeoning inter-racial love affair - was deemed inappropriate for local audiences. The film also ran into trouble with local censorship boards in the US South for challenging the prevailing racial orthodoxies - and idiocies - in an intelligent, persuasive manner.

However, in the wake of Pool of LondonRs <$>critical and box office successit proved impossible to keep Cameron permanently off local screens. He was simply too conspicuous in too many films. And many of his performances throughout the 1950s would have resonated with local audiences.

In 1955;s Simba, for instance, he played a Western educated Kenyan doctor torn between his sympathies for the civilising aspects of European rule and the Mau Mau rebellion then savagely challenging the British.

Placed again at the moral centre of the film, the understated heroism of Cameron’s Dr. Karanja discredits both the overweening sense of entitlement demonstrated by Dirk Bogarde’s odious farmer and the bloody bush war strategies of the Mau Mau (although he ultimately dies for his belief that non-violent solutions to Africa’s colonial problems are both possible and desireable).

And in 1959, Bermuda’s year of miracles on the racial front, Cameron re-teamed with director Deardfor Sapphire. <$>The film was made in the wake of race riots in London’s Notting Hill district. Nominally a murder mystery, police investigations into the death of the title character - a young black woman who has successfully passed for white - uncover the underlying tensions, prejudices and arrested thinking that characterised an era when Britain was attempting to come to terms with its black population and transplanted West Indians were attempting to come to terms with their new environment.

As much a cultural portrait of the period as a police procedural, Cameron - who plays Sapphire’s doctor brother - steals every scene he is in, indirectly diagnosing what might loosely be called the social disease that led to his sister’s death: a congenital intolerance he is entirely helpless to treat.

Cameron, who began his career on the British stage in the 1940s, fully understood the responsibilities that came with his success.

“I must say that when I got a script that showed black people in a derogatory way I would say, ‘No, I am not going to do it’ or I would tell the director to change things about it,” he says. “Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Fortunately, most of the parts I did I am proud of. I don’t mean my acting; others can judge that. But there’s no-one I have felt ashamed to play in theatre, film or television. I can’t think of anything like that.”

In the 1970 he appeared at City Hall in a production of Brecht’s Life oflileo<$> staged by the Bermuda Musical &<\p>Dramatic Society and directed by future Academy<\p>Award nominee Mike Leigh. While the show’s ambitious reach sometimes exceeded its grasp, Cameron was mesmerising in the title role. At one point, Galileo is heckled by a former student for compromising his rationalist beliefs in order to placate the dogmatic Roman<\p>Catholic Church. “Unhappy is the land that lacks heroes!” shouts the outraged pupil. A defensive Galileo replies: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero!”

Not in this instance, Mr.<\p>Cameron, not in this iance. - Tim Hodgson