Earle Hyman

One of the recurring joys of writing this column is discovering new things you absolutely, positively have to track down. Like a 1979 all-black-performers production of Coriolanus featuring, among others, Keith David, Morgan Freeman, CCH Pounder, Roscoe Orman (best known as Gordon from Sesame Street), and a twenty-five-year-old Denzel Washington. It seems to have been done in the classic Elizabethan fashion wherein most of the cast plays multiple characters as needed. However, Cominius is a major enough character so that it’s the only one Earle Hyman portrayed.

Hyman wanted to act since he was a child. He performed a poem in church at age four and knew it was what he wanted from life. His parents took him from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to Brooklyn, New York, as part of the Great Migration, which is how he was able to see Alla Nazimova in a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts as a teenager, selling him for sure on the idea. A mere four years later, he made his Broadway debut in Run, Little Chillun. He would go on to be a major figure on the stages of three countries—the US, the UK, and Norway.

There likely aren’t a ton of black actors who are big in Norway, though Hyman was considered a friend of the country. Now, I don’t have a lot of the details on this. The love of Norway seems to have been at least in part stemming back to that same Ibsen play. However, it was likely also in part love of a Norwegian sailor named Rolf Sirnes, who taught him the language. The pair were together for fifty years.

Of course, Hyman didn’t just appear on the stage. His film debut was in The Lost Weekend. His TV debut was on a CBS program called Camera Three, wherein he played Othello—an actually black Othello long before Hollywood would consider such a thing for the big screen. He mostly stayed on stage, dabbling in big and small screen productions. The majority of his appearances were in prestige productions, which makes his 126 episodes as Panthro on Thundercats a bit jarring, but I suppose peaceful cabins in rural Norway don’t pay for themselves.

And, yeah, he was one of the grandfathers who wasn’t a famous jazz musician on The Cosby Show, despite being only some eleven years older than his putative son. There were a lot of talented people on that show, and it’s always a little sad when you have to bring them up in that context. Forty episodes of it need to be mentioned, after all, even if you could wish it didn’t.