Lucinda

Tommy Hollis Black actor who escaped from stereotyped roles • Tommy Hollis • The Guardian, Tuesday 18 December 2001 02.29 GMT • Article history (A CO-WORKER SPEAKING) I first met the actor Tommy Hollis, who has died aged 47 of a heart attack, in a rehearsal room in New York, with the director Richard Wilson and the Royal Court theatre's casting director, Lisa Makin. "We were auditioning for the lead role in my play, I Just Stopped By To See The Man, and looking for an actor with the presence and voice to play a 75-year-old blues legend. Tommy was a little young, but he had the experience to play the role. However, his resume did not mention musical skills, and so we asked him to give us a song: within a few seconds, the windows were shaking. Later, he explained his strategy: "If you're a black actor and your resume says you can sing, you don't get cast in plays, just musicals." Much as he enjoyed singing, he went on, the challenge of performing plays was central to his life. Hollis was born in Jacksonville, Texas. His father was a self-made businessman, but he was drawn to the arts. He graduated from Lon Morris Jr College and went to the University of Houston, becoming part of the city's theatre scene for a decade, playing in Brecht, Pirandello and Fugard. Movie directors deployed his combination of physical power and tender-heartedness to good effect: Spike Lee chose him to play Malcolm X's father - a preacher who was tough enough to aim a pistol at five Klan riders who had burned down his family home, but was too forgiving to kill them. In Primary Colors, Mike Nichols cast him as Fat Willy, who ran the favorite restaurant of John Travolta's presidential candidate. Inevitably, the role called for Hollis to bind everyone's emotional wounds with a rendition of You Are My Sunshine. It was a typical Hollis touch that, when he subsequently reappears to upset the candidate's applecart by accusing him of making his teenage daughter pregnant, he does so more in sorrow than in anger. But it was the theatre - and specifically new plays - that Hollis favored. One of his fondest memories was of his two-year stint playing Reverend Avery on tour in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. Wilson wrote eight separate endings, all of which had to be tested on the road before a definitive version was reached. When the play hit New York in 1991, Hollis won the Theatre World award for the year's outstanding Broadway debut. In 1987, he visited the Royal Court in London, as one of the five actors in George C Wolfe's The Coloured Museum, which transferred to the Duke of York's. Of his performance, the theatre critic Charles Spencer wrote: "Tommy Hollis is magnificent; his sudden moments of emotional vulnerability catch at the heart." Hollis's last Broadway performance was as the Reverend Sprague, in the short lived musical The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. His commanding stage presence and fine bass voice were praised on all sides. He is survived by his mother, sisters and brothers. •Tommy Janor Hollis, actor, born March 22 1954; died September 9, 2001 The actor who originated the role of Booker T. Washington in Terence McNally's Tony-award winning Ragtime and appeared as Malcolm X's father in Spike Lee's film of the same name, seasoned stage actor Tommy Hollis also made frequent appearances in film and television, where he was a familiar face to viewers of I'll Fly Away. A noted concert performer and traditional gospel singer as well as a talented actor, Hollis' most popular stage roles included I Just Stopped By to See the Man at London's Royal Court Theatre, George C. Wolfe's Colored Museum, and August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, for which he won the Theater World Award for outstanding Broadway debut in 1991. Frequently reprising his stage roles for small screen adaptations, Hollis also made appearances on television's Law and Order and New York Undercover.