Norman Beaton
| Norman Beaton | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Norman Lugard Beaton 31 October 1934 Georgetown, British Guiana |
| Died | 13 December 1994 (aged 60) Georgetown, Guyana |
| Notable work | Desmond Ambrose in Desmond's |
Norman Lugard Beaton (31 October 1934 – 13 December 1994) was a Guyanese actor long resident in the United Kingdom.
Beaton attended Queen's College in Guyana until he was expelled for truancy and bad grades. He was given a second chance at the Government Teachers' Training College and graduated with distinction. Beaton taught and played with the calypso band The Four Bees before leaving Guyana for London in 1960.
Beaton developed a parallel career as a calypso singer, scoring a number-one hit in Trinidad and Tobago with "Come Back Melvina" in 1959. He then obtained a post in the shipping department of a bookshop until his wife and children arrived in London in 1960. He then became a teacher in Liverpool, becoming the first black teacher to be employed by the Liverpool Education Authority. While in the city, he played guitar for Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough - who became known as the Liverpool Poets - including appearances at the famous Cavern Club. Beaton became increasingly unhappy with his work as a teacher and began writing plays, his first play being the musical Jack of Spades, which was about the doomed relationship between a black man and a white woman, quite controversial at that time. The moderate success of this play gave Beaton enough confidence to give up teaching and to concentrate on the theatre. He moved first to Bristol and then to Sussex where he played the leading role in a musical he had written, Sit Down, Banna, at the Connaught Theatre. This was the beginning of his acting career.
In the early 1970s, Beaton began to perform in plays in London's West End. In 1970 he played the role of Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which he described in his autobiography as "the most important role of my acting career", and also played a small role in the Frankie Howerd comedy film Up the Chastity Belt the following year. In 1975, he helped to establish the Black Theatre of Brixton. In 1975 Beaton played Nanki-Poo in The Black Mikado, a modern version of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. In 1976, Beaton broke into television in the series The Fosters, which also featured a young Lenny Henry, and the following year played the lead role in a low-budget independent film about a West Indian community in London, Black Joy; he also appeared in the BBC series Empire Road. However, it was his six-year run (starting in 1988) in Channel Four's Desmond's, (written by Trix Worrell) as the title character Desmond Ambrose, that would become his best-known role. For Desmond's Beaton received the Royal Television Society Best Comedy Performer Award.
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