December 1, 1999
John Berry, 82, Director Who Went Into Exile During ´50s Blacklist
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
ohn Berry, a stage and movie director, writer and actor who
made more than 50 films and, entangled in the blacklist, exiled
himself from Hollywood during the anti-communist inquests of the
1950s, died Nov. 29 at his home in Paris. He was 82.
Long drawn to the dramatic conflicts of South Africa, Berry had
just finished editing his latest film, "Boesman and Lena," based
on a 1969 play by Athol Fugard, said Kent Jones, a curator with the
Film Society of Lincoln Center. Berry had directed an acclaimed
production of the play at Circle in the Square in 1970. The film
about an outcast couple -- so-called Cape coloreds, classified
neither white nor black and forced to wander a dismal landscape --
stars Danny Glover and Angela Bassett and is set for release in
May.
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Berry, a rugged-faced
pipe smoker, worked alongside many of the era's leading lights,
from Orson Welles to Paul Muni, Richard Wright, Joan Fontaine, John
Garfield, Shelley Winters, Fernandel, Jean-Paul Sartre, John
Houseman, Lillian Gish, Curt Jurgens and Dorothy Dandridge.
He appeared in Welles' Mercury Theater production of "Julius
Caesar"; played a defense lawyer in a 1942 Broadway production of
Wright's "Native Son"; directed Garfield and Winters in the 1951
thriller "He Ran All the Way," about a fugitive murderer who
terrorizes a family, and wrote the screenplay for "Tamango," a
1957 film that paired Jurgens and Dandridge as interracial lovers,
a provocative premise at the time.
His work, not surprisingly, drew both bouquets and brickbats,
but his most difficult ordeal began in 1950 after he agreed to make
a short film on the Hollywood 10, a group of leading moviemakers
who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities
Committee's investigation into alleged communist infiltration of
the movie business.
As Berry later recounted in a 1974 interview with The New York
Times, when the House panel began looking into him, there was
testimony about a supposed communist cell meeting at his house in
Hollywood; he said he knew nothing about it. By the end of the
year, "faced with the choice of naming names or going to jail,"
he had packed up and moved, poverty stricken, to Paris, leaving his
wife, Gladys Cole, and two young children behind. They later joined
him, but the marriage fell apart.
Yet he said: "People frequently ask me if I'm bitter about
those days and and I must admit that I regret some of it. But the
horizon of my life became infinite; I met people, encountered a
culture I'd never have known otherwise, one I got to know deeply
because I had to survive in it." He returned to the United States
in 1964 but retained his ties to Paris.
Berry was born in 1917 in the Bronx where he made his stage
debut at 5 in a vaudeville act. His father became a wealthy
restaurateur -- at one point he owned 28 restaurants -- and one was
near the Playhouse on West 49th Street where young John would be
deposited on matinee days.
The family lost its wealth in the Depression and Berry ended up
in the Catskills telling jokes at resort hotels for $5 a week. He
joined a Shakespeare troupe in the city and auditioned before John
Houseman for the part of Marc Antony in a Mercury Theater
production of "Julius Caesar."
"You're a splendid fellow," Houseman said, "but your speech
is dreadful." He prescribed elocution lessons. Berry joined the
production and won other parts, rising to become an assistant to
Welles, which turned him away from acting and toward directing.
"It was like living near the center of a volcano of creating
inspiration and fury -- glamorous and exciting, full of the kind of
theatricality that seems lost forever," he recalled in the Times
interview.
In 1942, he played in and helped direct Welles' production of
"Native Son" about a black man who kills a white woman, and later
took it on the road, experiencing, as he said, "the enormous
prejudice, the overpowering sense of white superiority that existed
everywhere."
In 1944, with Houseman's help, he began his Hollywood career,
soon directing "Miss Susie Slagle's" (1946) with Lillian Gish,
Veronica Lake and Sonny Tufts. There followed a flurry of other
films including "Cross My Heart" (1946), "Casbah," (1948) and
" Tension" (1949). He directed the John Garfield film, "He Ran
All the Way" -- the blacklisted actor's last movie -- before his
film on the Hollywood 10 drove Berry into exile in Paris.
He arrived with $800 and scratched out a living ghostwriting
scripts. At one point, he recalled, he was down to his last 28
cents.
He marked his return to the United States in 1964 with an
off-Broadway production of Fugard's "Blood Knot" about two
brothers, one black, the other white.
In 1970, he directed "Boesman and Lena" with James Earl Jones
at Circle in the Square and months later, Lorraine Hansberry's
"Blancs," also with Jones. Two years later Berry directed two
plays, Romulus Linney's "Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks" on
Broadway and Arthur Miller's "Crucible" at Lincoln Center.
Meanwhile, he also kept making films. In 1974 he directed
Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones in the comedy "Claudine." In
1978 came "The Bad News Bears Go to Japan" (critics said they
should have stayed home) and in 1982 he teamed up again with Ms.
Carroll for a television movie shown on NBC, "Sister, Sister,"
written by Maya Angelou, a co-producer.
Berry's family could not be reached in Paris yesterday, but
Variety reported that he is survived by his wife, Myriam Boyer; two
sons, Dennis and Arnie, and a daughter, Jan.
