Every once in a while, I think of someone in a different genre than everyone else. Esther Rolle is most famous for her comedy—she’s probably most famous for first being on a spinoff and then a spinoff of that spinoff—but I think of her in one of her last roles, her performance as Aunt Sarah in 1997’s Rosewood. This is only partly because I am completely unfamiliar with the various All in the Family spinoffs, not having liked the original particularly. It is also because it’s a really powerful movie, and she’s very good in it.
Esther Rolle actually had a long and distinguished career already by the time she appeared on Maude; while she hadn’t done much in the way of movies or TV, she was well established on the stage. She was, by 1960, the director of the dance troupe founded by Asadata Dafora, variously named Shogolo Oloba, the Federal Theater African Dance Troupe, or Asadata Dafora Horton and his African Dancers; she took over when Dafora returned to a newly independent Sierra Leone to be its cultural minister. I’m not sure if she ever dances on her famous TV shows; I certainly didn’t know until just now that she could dance that well.
It sounds, too, as though Good Times was not a great experience for her. She had to fight to get her character a husband instead of just having a fatherless black family—and if you don’t understand why that was important to her, think about the optics of having one of the first black-themed sitcoms be about a single mother. As the series went on, the focus on J. J. Evans became more of a thing, taking away from the serious themes she had been hoping to explore. She even left the show, after costar John Amos had been fired.
It’s disheartening, really, that her concerns were clearly dismissed. I wonder how different the TV landscape would look if people didn’t spend as much time pursuing the gimmick character. Because the gimmick character inevitably becomes really, really annoying, after all. Look at poor Jaleel White. I think the shows that have lasted the longest have been ones that had the strength to resist putting all their weight on that character, and that’s not just number of episodes but legacy. We remember sitcoms for being funny, sure, but also for the moments when they were more than just funny.
I’ve also been meaning for years to track down, you’ll pardon the expression, Summer of My German Soldier, for which she won an Emmy. The copy of the book I’ve had for decades has a photo insert from the miniseries, with Esther Rolle as the maid who is the main character’s only friend other than the eponymous German soldier. It looks like the whole thing’s on YouTube now; I’ll have to make the time for it soon.
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