D'Urville Martin
Martin was a New Yorker who began working in the mid-1960s and, inside three years, had walked through two of the decade's most talked-about films: Frankie in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967 and Diego in Rosemary's Baby in 1968. He also played Lionel Jefferson in two unaired pilots for what eventually became All in the Family, which is a fair summary of his position in the industry. He was present at the making of several famous things and was never the person on the poster.
The 1970s gave him a genre that used him properly. Blaxploitation ran on actors who could hold a scene against a star, and Martin worked constantly: the Reverend Rufus in Larry Cohen's Black Caesar, the bus driver in Watermelon Man, a pilot in Sheba, Baby opposite Pam Grier, and two Fred Williamson westerns whose titles were designed to provoke and are not repeated here.
He directed as well, and that is the part that outlived him. Dolemite, the Rudy Ray Moore vehicle, is his, and it became the film that fixed his name in the culture long after the acting work had stopped being catalogued anywhere. It is not among the credits listed on this page.
Movies (7)
Where to start with D'Urville Martin
Rosemary's Baby and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner are the two everyone has seen, and the reason to watch them here is to notice how limited the parts available to him were in the very films that were supposedly about progress.
Then go to Black Caesar, which is the best film of his blaxploitation run and the one where Larry Cohen's guerrilla shooting on real New York streets gives the whole thing a documentary charge. Watermelon Man is the sharpest satire on the list. Sheba, Baby is minor Pam Grier but still Pam Grier. If you want the directing rather than the acting, seek out Dolemite, which is where his reputation actually lives.