Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 5, 1991 TAG: 9102050246
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
Gone are the days of poorly paid stints on London's theatrical fringe. The 43-year-old actor is becoming an American TV star, and someday, he was saying incredulously, he might even be rich.
"I started out thinking, `Well, this is great. I shall make some money to pay for all those weeks of sleeping in a van and being bitten by mosquitoes in India,' " said Marcell, who plays Geoffrey the butler in NBC's "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air," which stars Grammy-winning rap star Will Smith.
It's a decided contrast to early 1989, when Marcell was touring Britain and India in two plays, "Julius Caesar" and "Creon," earning less in a week than he now makes in an hour.
The series, which airs at 8 p.m. Mondays on Channel 10 in the Roanoke area, casts Marcell as the quintessentially proper British butler employed to maintain the Bank family in West Coast luxury. Smith is the Banks' streetwise nephew from Philadelphia.
NBC has ordered 24 episodes for 1990-91 of the Monday night comedy, the second highest-rated new series of the season after ABC's "America's Funniest People." On Jan. 14, it began airing in Britain on the British Broadcasting Corp.
The show has brought prosperity to Marcell, but the actor recalls a time when life was otherwise.
"I was a kid who was raised in Peckham," he said, referring to a tough working-class area in southeast London. "I did the clubs and stole the stuff and smashed the windows. I went out in gangs like everybody else, and have the scars to prove it."
Marcell is one of 10 children born to a carpenter who emigrated from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia when the actor was 5. He was studying engineering at Sheffield University in south Yorkshire when he saw New York's Negro Ensemble Company on tour in London and decided acting was for him.
"I kind of fell out with my father because I decided, `This is it,' " said Marcell, who dropped out of college with another 18 months to go.
The early years were slow, and Marcell supplemented his meager income from acting by taking such jobs as an electrician's assistant at Buckingham Palace.
He spent 1972-75 with the Royal Shakespeare Company, cultivating his skills in the classics. Since then, he has moved between stage, TV and the large screen, where he played Moses, Donald Woods' ally, in the anti-apartheid movie "Cry Freedom."
Marcell is proud of making the transition to Hollywood.
"I am the absolute first black to actually be brought over from England to America" for a TV series, Marcell said, speaking in clipped tones not dissimilar from Geoffrey's own posh sounds.
"One of the things I have always wanted to do has been bridge that gap of water," he said. "I shall have a career that is TV and film and show business in LA, and I shall come over here every summer and either do a small play or something with one of the black companies, because it's something I ought to do to keep my hand in."
Marcell was doing just that when he got the job in "Fresh Prince." On April 30 of last year, he finished a limited engagement at north London's Tricycle Theater in August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," earning about $245 a week.
The next day, he left for Los Angeles to film the "Fresh Prince" pilot.
"It fit every story I've ever heard or read about people pumping gas somewhere and the big producer comes up and says, `You're the man I'm looking for,' " Marcell said with a chuckle.
"This was not a plan, not a decision on my part," he said. "It was there, I had to choose and I think I would have been foolish to choose otherwise."
by CNB