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This article profiles motion picture actor and director Melvin Van Peebles. Not too long ago the options available to black film actors were quite limited: The big screen had little room for African American main characters, and the African Americans who did appear on screen were often cast as domestic servants or street thugs of one variety or another. One of the people responsible for breaking that narrow thinking is writer, actor, and director Melvin Van Peebles. He opened the door to having the full range of African American life portrayed in the movies. Born in Chicago in 1932, Van Peebles spent most of his youth with his father, a tailor, in Phoenix, Illinois. Van Peebles' best-known film is Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. |
