New York Times: Geoffrey Holder Dies at 84
(Credit: Erin Combs/Toronto Star, via Getty Images)
John Malveaux of
sends this link:
The New York Times
By JENNIFER DUNNING and WILLIAM McDONALD
the
dancer, choreographer, actor, composer, designer and painter who used
his manifold talents to infuse the arts with the flavor of his native
West Indies and to put a singular stamp on the American cultural scene,
not least with his outsize personality, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He
was 84.
Charles M. Mirotznik, a spokesman for the family, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
Few
cultural figures of the last half of the 20th century were as
multifaceted as Mr. Holder, and few had a public presence as
unmistakable as his, with his gleaming pate atop a 6-foot-6 frame,
full-bodied laugh and bassoon of a voice laced with the lilting cadences
of the Caribbean.
Mr.
Holder directed a dance troupe from his native Trinidad and Tobago,
danced on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera and won Tony Awards
in 1975 for direction of a musical and costume design for “The Wiz,” a
rollicking, all-black version of “The Wizard of Oz.” His choreography
was in the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the
Dance Theater of Harlem. He acted onstage and in films and was an
accomplished painter, photographer and sculptor whose works have been
shown in galleries and museums. He published a cookbook.
Mr. Holder acknowledged that he achieved his widest celebrity as the jolly, white-suited television pitchman for 7Up
in the 1970s and ’80s, when in a run of commercials, always in tropical
settings, he happily endorsed the soft drink as an “absolutely
maaarvelous” alternative to Coca-Cola — or “the Uncola,” as the ads put
it.
Long
afterward, white suit or no, he would stop pedestrian traffic and draw
stares at restaurants. He even good-naturedly alluded to the TV spots in
accepting his Tony for directing, using their signature line “Just try making something like that out of a cola nut.”
Geoffrey
Lamont Holder was born into a middle-class family on Aug. 1, 1930, in
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, one of four children of Louise de
Frense and Arthur Holder, who had immigrated from Barbados.
Geoffrey attended Queen’s Royal College, an elite secondary school in
Trinidad. There he struggled with a stammer that plagued him into early
adulthood.
“At school, when I got up to read, the teacher would say, ‘Next,’ because the boys would laugh,” he said in an oral history interview.
Growing
up, Mr. Holder came under the wing of his talented older brother,
Arthur Aldwyn Holder, known to everyone by his childhood nickname,
Boscoe. Boscoe Holder taught Geoffrey painting and dancing and recruited
him to join a small, folkloric dance troupe he had formed, the Holder
Dancing Company. Boscoe was 16; Geoffrey, 7.
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