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Movies Skyfall, Twelfth Night - or What You, Britannia Hospital, Offside Similar Tim Supple, Sam Mendes, Lindsay Anderson, Roger Deakins | ||
Burt Caesar is a British actor, broadcaster and director for stage and television, who was born in St Kitts and migrated to England with his family as a child. His wide-ranging career has encompassed acting in Bond films (Skyfall, 2012), stage performances including in Shakespearian roles, and many plays for BBC Radio Four. Caesar regularly works as a director and is an artistic advisor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He is also a commentator on theatre and literature.
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Theatre and radio
As a stage actor, Caesar has had roles that include in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (Birmingham Rep and Market Theatre, Johannesburg, with Janet Suzman), as Capulet in Romeo and Juliet (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith), Macduff in Macbeth (St Barts, New York, New York International Festival of Theatre), as well as in productions of other Shakespeare plays such as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and The Tempest (Liverpool Everyman). His other theatre includes Noises Off by Michael Frayn, Crusade (Stratford East), Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa! (Watermill Theatre), Fanny Kemble, Blood Knot, Eden, James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield), In Self Defence, Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (Royal Court), Douglas Jerrold's Black-Eyed Susan (Oxford Playhouse, 1987), Judith, Carnival War (Royal Court), Sergeant Ola (Royal Court), Strange Fruit, and The Miser. His performance as "Old Mack" in Errol John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, which opened in 2012 at the Cottesloe Theatre, with a subsequent tour in 2014, received widely positive notice, being described by Theatre News Online as "compelling in his choreographed smoothness" and by The Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington as "richly remarkable". His 2015 performance in Timberlake Wertenbaker's Jefferson's Garden at the Watford Palace Theatre was also well received.
Caesar has given acclaimed readings of Derek Walcott's long poem "The Schooner Flight" both on stage and radio.
Caesar's radio work includes frequent performances in plays, including a dramatisation by Margaret Busby of C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1998, Biyi Bandele's 2002 dramatisation of Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, Patricia Cumper's dramatisation of Andrea Levy's Small Island, broadcast in 2004, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in 2005, the play's first radio production for more than 20 years.
In August 2007, Caesar's Radio 4 programme To Sir, With Love Revisited, directed by Mary Ward-Lowery, about E. R. Braithwaite's 1959 autobiographical account of teaching at a school in the East End of London, was described by The Guardian′s reviewer as "utterly charming radio". Caesar's feature Black Students in Red Russia — which among other interviews included one with Jan Carew, author of the 1964 novel Moscow Is Not My Mecca — was chosen by the New Statesman as a "Pick of the Week" when the programme was broadcast on Radio 4 (again produced by Ward-Lowery) in January 2009.
Also that year Caesar presented Black Screen Britain, a two-part Radio 4 documentary series exploring how British film and television drama portrayed post-war African-Caribbean migrants and created opportunities for pioneering black actors. He is a regular reader of poetry and short stories on a variety of programmes, including Poetry Please. On the programme A Good Read in 2010, Caesar's choice of book was C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary.
Film and television
Among films in which he appeared are Skyfall (2012), Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), Bad Boy Blues (1995), Britannia Hospital (1982), New Year’s Day (2001), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The Amnesty Files (HBO), and Scoop (1987).
His television appearances include parts in Holby City (BBC), Casualty (BBC), Dalziel & Pascoe (BBC), The Bill (Thames TV), Prime Suspect (Granada TV), Prime Suspect II, Between The Lines (BBC), Albion Market (Granada), Revolver (Thames), The Professionals (ITV), Us Girls (BBC), Hard Cases (Central), We Are the Elephant, No Problem! (Channel 4), Girls on Top, Dancers, and The Cleopatras (BBC). Most recently he appeared on BBC One in Death in Paradise.
He is also sought after as a narrator for documentaries as well as for voice-over work.
Directing
Alongside acting, Caesar has over the years directed regularly for both stage and television. In 1986 he and Yemi Ajibade directed Waiting for Hannibal, which opened at the Drill Hall, followed by a national tour, with Judith Jacobs, Wilbert Johnson and others in the cast. Among other productions he directed Sidepockets at the Theatre Royal Stratford East; Cloud Nine at the Contact Theatre, Manchester; Trish Cooke's Back Street Mammy (West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1991); Eugene O'Neill's All God’s Chillun Got Wings at West Yorkshire Playhouse (1993); and Michele Celeste's My Goat at the Soho Theatre Company (1994). Caesar was former Associate Director at the Royal Court Theatre.
Film and TV drama he has directed includes, for the NT Archive, Remembrance by Derek Walcott and Welcome Home Jacko by Mustapha Matura, as well as numerous episodes of the BBC One medical soap opera Doctors.
He is an artistic advisor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where productions he has directed include Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brothers Size and Yerma by Federico Garcia Lorca.
His work as a tutor includes working with award-winning producer and director Tim Reid, founder of the Legacy Media Institute, on intensive filmmakers workshops both in the UK and the US, in partnership with the British Film Institute.
Caesar is also a creative consultant at the Museum of London Docklands. Discovering his family name in the papers of Thomas and John Mills, plantation owners in St Kitts, during the development of the exhibition Sugar and Slavery, Caesar said: "For all British citizens of West Indian origin the Mills papers are vital documents in the often hidden or ‘lost’ history of slavery in the islands. As someone born in St. Kitts, and now living in London, these papers are even more important. On a personal level, there may be a direct family connection: a ‘Caesar’ is listed in the Mills papers. And on the grander scale of historical legacy, they provide further evidence of the long established link between the West Indies and England. My fellow Kittitians and I are descended from survivors of one side of a brutal and profitable trade which always had London at its centre." Caesar is the brother of filmmaker Imruh Bakari. Caesar has also been a critic and commentator on theatre and literature.