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Celebrating the Living: Noel De Souza

Posted By Gillianren on January 31, 2021 in Features | Leave a response

If Noel De Souza and BarBara Luna are the only two people living from the ’50s Disney Zorro, well, that’s still not bad. Probably at least a few of the child extras are, but after all it was a show featuring almost nothing but adults in most episodes. De Souza was 33 when he appeared on a single episode, as part of a trap set for Zorro. He played a character named Paco. I think Paco is supposed to be younger than De Souza was, but that’s really not what’s most interesting about the character. The last time I watched through the series, I was checking on the ethnicity of every actor I could. It is true that De Souza is Indian—but in the sense that he was born in Secunderabad.

I would imagine the ’50s weren’t a great time to be a young Indian actor in Hollywood. It was a strange time, an era in which the odds that someone of any specific ethnicity was playing their own ethnicity were slim. Actually, season one of Zorro—in which De Souza’s episode aired—was reasonably good at hiring Hispanic and Native American actors to play at least the minor characters. (And as we’ve discovered, Don Alejandro was played by someone born in Mexico.) It’s why it was so surprising to see him among them.

But beyond Zorro, he’s one of those actors who played a lot of different ethnicities. And no few people of unspecified ethnicity, whose characters were never developed enough for their ethnicities to matter. After all, most of them never had names. A few desk clerks. A waiter or two. Interestingly, he even played a couple of doctors. And in the last decade or so, he’s played two characters credited as “Older Indian Man.” Which, of course, is a pretty accurate descriptor of De Souza himself.

He is also, unfortunately, one of those people it’s difficult to find much out about, at least during the kind of cursory search that I have to admit is what I do for most of these articles. He’s apparently a voting member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which means I guess we have a name we can direct complaints about the Golden Globes to? But he has no Wikipedia page. His Memory Alpha page—he played Gandhi on an episode of Voyager—is basically an unpacked version of his IMDb page. There’s not a lot to be found.

And, yes, he’s still alive. Twice in the last week, people died after having appeared in this column. Both were women in their 90s, so it’s hardly surprising that it happened. I would like to remind everyone that, yes, the intent of this column was to get to as many people as possible so I wouldn’t have to write obituaries as often. I suspect there will be fewer obituaries of De Souza as there were of Cloris Leachman and Cicely Tyson. But for those who do write them, I wish them good luck in finding more information about him than I did.

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Posted in Features | Tagged celebrate the living, Noel De Souza, tribute

About the Author

gillianmadeira@hotmail.com'

Gillianren

Gillianren is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a daughter up for adoption. She fills her days by watching her local library system’s DVD collection in alphabetical order, watching everything that looks interesting. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the ’60s and ’70s. She has a Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/gillianren

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