Jeillo Edwards
Jeillo Edwards mattered more to British television than her credit list will ever show. Sierra Leonean by birth, she was the first woman of African descent to study drama at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and she became one of the first Black actresses cast in a mainstream British television drama when she appeared in Dixon of Dock Green. She then worked for more than four decades across television, radio, stage and film.
What that career looked like in practice is visible in the parts gathered here, and it is not flattering to the industry: a nurse in the BBC anthology Centre Play, a midwife in Black Books, a benefits clerk in Spaced, a hospital cleaner in Dirty Pretty Things. Small women in uniforms, most of them barely named.
The nearest thing to an exception is Beautiful Thing, where she plays Rose in a film that treats an entire London estate as a place full of actual people, and Murder Investigation Team, which gives her a name and a storyline to work with. Historically she was a door-opener. On screen she was usually handed the door to hold.
Movies (2)
TV (4)
Where to start with Jeillo Edwards
Beautiful Thing is the film to start with, and it happens to be the best thing on this list by a wide margin: a warm, unsentimental story about two teenage boys on a London estate, made in 1996 when very little else on British screens was treating that subject with kindness.
Dirty Pretty Things is the other serious one, a thriller about the people who clean the hotels a city prefers not to think about, and casting her as one of them is bleakly apt. The comedies are worth your time on their own merits, though her scenes in Spaced and Black Books are brief. Murder Investigation Team gives her the most conventional acting work of the six, and Centre Play is the archival curiosity, a BBC anthology strand from the early seventies.