Tamara Dobson

One of the eternal fascinations of this column is The Person Who Disappeared From The Entertainment Industry. Sometimes, there’s no evidence to explain it. Sometimes, there’s an explicit statement. And sometimes, you can piece it together from what you do have without having confirmation. I’m always curious about what they did after their time in the industry, and about the only time we get that is “and then she got married and had kids.” It’s always a woman for that. And this time, no children are mentioned. No husband is mentioned. There’s a disease, but it wasn’t diagnosed until 2000. So while I can guess why Tamara Dobson quit acting, I am left curious as to what she did next.

Every now and again, we come across someone whose career might as well only be one role, and that is true of Dobson. Would likely be true to me, at least, even with a longer career. Because her one role was Cleopatra Jones. Which I simply adore. I think I own both the movies, some of my haul from the last great sale of the Warners Archive of sainted memory. This is in part my deep and abiding love of blaxploitation, but it also stems from how simply amazing Dobson is. She holds her own even opposite Shelley Winters in the first one.

Now, part of it is that she was physically of the type that gets called Amazon or Valkyrie. She was six foot two and gorgeous. I would not be at all surprised to hear that she’s well remembered in, shall we say, certain interesting corners of the internet. Before she acted, she was a model, and she was a very popular one. She was apparently one of the go-to models in the early ‘70s for advertising geared toward black audiences. (It was several years before my birth, all other considerations aside, so you couldn’t prove it by me.) Among other things, she seems to have been the face for Tigress Perfume, from Faberge.

But also, wow, she was a powerful actress. A lot of the acting in blaxploitation is so much better than the script deserves. It’s one of the reasons I love the genre. It’s clear to me, at least, that Dobson was fully capable of being a dynamic force in acting except for the part where, you know, she was a black woman, and the roles she was capable of weren’t available for her. Frankly, they weren’t available for women just in general as much as they should’ve been in the ‘70s, but she was of the opinion that being black was a bigger issue and that her career would’ve been easier if she’d been white.

She was undoubtedly correct, of course. There’s a long, long list of performers whose careers should have been stronger and who could tell stories of racism. Even today, I’m not sure how many roles there would have been for a Tamara Dobson. It’s unjust. It’s frustrating, too, especially given the unending stream of Generic White Boys there’s apparently room for. There should’ve been a place for a woman like Dobson, and I hope that, whatever she did with the years between 1984 and 2006, it brought her joy.