Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 16, 1994 TAG: 9404160080
SECTION: TV/RADIO PAGE: SPECTATOR 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON MILLER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"My first experience with it came when I made my first movie in America," Seymour recalls.
That was 1972's "Live and Let Die," Roger Moore's first film as secret agent James Bond, which filmed extensively in New Orleans before returning to England for interiors. Seymour, who played the seductive Solitaire, noticed the strained relations between blacks and whites while soaking up the strange new culture.
"In my family, we never thought of foreigners or people with different colored skin as being any different from ourselves," she explains. "It didn't really occur to me until later in life that there are people for whom this is a very great issue."
It came home to her even more forcefully after the film company returned to England and Seymour took some of the black cast members - including Yaphet Kotto, Geoffrey Holder and Julius Harris - to her favorite pub. She discovered they were very uncomfortable and so, apparently, were some of the patrons.
"I saw some stuff going on there that I really didn't like," Seymour now recalls. "These were my friends."
Like all good actresses, Seymour filed those memories away for possible use someday. More than 20 years later, she finally had occasion to dredge them up, along with a lot more experience with racism picked up along the way, for Sunday's ABC movie, "A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story" (at 9 p.m. on WSET-Channel 13).
In the film, Seymour plays Smith, a courageous Mississippi newspaper editor who put her career, her personal reputation and perhaps even her life on the line for the cause of racial equality at a time when most of her lifelong friends were ready to turn against her. In 1964, Smith became the first female journalist to win the Pulitzer Prize, a testament to the war of words she waged against racism beginning in 1954.
"I knew nothing about her at all," Seymour says over the phone from the set of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," her hit CBS series. "In fact, it wasn't until I finished reading the script that I realized she was a real person."
Of course, Seymour already knew she wanted to play Smith because her story was so intensely dramatic. The fact she was a real woman just made it more tempting.
Seymour describes herself as a "transformational actor," which means she immerses herself in everything she can learn about a character, so that when she finally steps in front of the camera, "I actually become the person." Though Smith is still alive, she's a victim of Alzheimer's disease and Seymour wasn't able to meet with her. Instead, she read everything she could find about her, screened scores of movies and TV shows about the period and tapped her best first-hand sources.
One of those was her real-life husband, James Keach, who directed the movie. Raised in Texas and brought up on Southern traditions, Keach knew, from personal experience, the climate the movie would reveal.
"He taught me a great deal about his experiences in the South," she says. "We talk a great deal about things when we work together. He's a fabulous director and really knows how to get a performance out of me."
Seymour also had two other special "teachers" - her two best girlfriends, a Mississippian and an Alabaman.
"They're both very intelligent women and they're both very Southern in the way they move and behave," she explains. "It's not just the accent. It's a whole behavior pattern a Southern woman has that's absolutely magnificent. I stole from both of them."
After taking all this in, Seymour decided how Hazel Smith ought to be played - as a frisky and hot-blooded woman who loved to defy convention, but also a true-blue Southerner who could understand why the new winds of integration and civil liberties were so chilling to so many of her friends and neighbors.
"In her day, I guess she was a sort of Joan Collins type," Seymour says, with a laugh. "She enjoyed being glamorous and surprising people, kicking the stuffiness out of the world she lived in. But she also felt that, underneath, these were basically good people who just needed to hear that the time had come to change."
In the movie, Smith returns to her hometown, Lexington, after a long trip abroad. The flamboyant Smith, one of the town's most sought-after belles, has a new husband in tow, handsome Walter (D.W. Moffett), a Northerner who's six years younger than Hazel. She resumes running her late father's newspaper while Walter becomes administrator of the local hospital.
Right away the rising Civil Rights movement begins to affect the town. Leaders rally behind Earl Clayburn (Richard Kiley), an old friend of Hazel's family, when he teams up with others to form a white citizens group to stand against racial integration. Hazel enjoys a close, friendly relationship with the paper's many black workers and begins opposing the growing influence of hatemongers such as the local sheriff and the emergence of Klan terrorism.
Eventually, her angry editorials and her pro-black policies make her a community pariah. Her husband loses his job after he orders a white doctor to treat a critically injured black patient and Klan attacks ultimately lead to the firebombing of the newspaper.
"When I make a movie, I always ask myself what I want the audience to respond to and how I want them to feel at the end," Seymour says. "I think what this movie does is ask each of us how racist we really are."
Seymour hopes "A Passion for Justice" suggests the whites who resisted change were not all bad people, but simply ignorant people who didn't know any better.
"That was the norm for them," she says. "Suddenly things changed and the process of change took them awhile. Out of fear, they joined groups and listened to people who cultivated that fear. And that still is going on today, big time."
Finally, Seymour trusts the film will demonstrate that "one woman, by herself, using her voice rather than violence, can make a difference."
by CNB