Pioneering Jamaican actor’s repertoire ranged from Shakespeare to EastEnders
When Mona Hammond graduated from drama school in 1964, she was told there was little work for black actresses and it would be sensible for her to develop alternative skills. It was a measure not only of her talent but also of the multicultural sea change Britain was to undergo that 30 years later between 18 and 19 million viewers were watching her three times a week as Blossom Jackson, one of the best-loved characters in the BBC television soap EastEnders.
Hammond’s character was a Caribbean immigrant and matriarch of the
Jackson family who worked in the
Albert Square cafe, dispensing endless cups of tea. Her relationship with
Holocaust survivor
Felix Kawalski provided some of the soap’s most moving scenes.
After appearing in almost every episode for more than three years, she left in 1997. The BBC offered her a pay rise to stay, but she was in her late 60s and told the producers that signing a new contract would ‘‘finish me off’’.
The scriptwriters reluctantly wrote her out with a plot line in which she moved to Israel with Felix. However, Hammond, who has died aged 91, was persuaded in her 80th year to appear in two episodes in 2010.
By the time Hammond became a familiar face in EastEnders in 1994, black actors on British television were no longer a rarity. Yet it had been a very different story when she arrived from Jamaica in 1959. Pauline Henriques, an earlier Jamaican immigrant who became the first black actress to appear on British TV, recalled being made to ‘‘white up’’ to act in a Shakespeare play.
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1964, Hammond found she was hitting a glass ceiling. There were brief cameo roles in TV series in 1968 and 1969 but, along with other black actors, writers and directors, she swiftly came to the conclusion that the only way to confront the lack of creative opportunities was to form their own theatre companies and to stage specifically black productions.
Her first lead role, in 1970 as Lady Macbeth in an all-black production at the Roundhouse in London, felt like a breakthrough moment both for Hammond and for black theatre in general. The programme for the production noted: ‘‘Mona has always been interested in Shakespeare, and while she was at Rada she had a longing to use her two years of training in a Shakespearean play. For her, The Black Macbeth is a dream come true.’’
As the decade went on, the Arts Council began to recognise and fund the emerging black theatre companies, and Hammond was at the forefront, starring in plays by up-andcoming black writers including Michael Abbensetts, Alfred Fagon and Mustapha Matura. She toured Britain in a celebrated production of Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies and later reprised her leading role in a 1985 BBC2 television adaptation.
That same year Hammond joined with Yvonne Brewster, Inigo Espejel and Carmen Munroe to form the black theatre company Talawa. The troupe’s name came from a Jamaican patois saying ‘‘Me lickle but me talawa’’, meaning to be small but gutsy or feisty. ‘‘All of us lickle, and all of us talawa, and all of us are women,’’ Hammond said of the founding quartet.
Funded by the Labour-controlled Greater London Council from its remaining cash reserves (which it was determined to donate to good causes before Margaret Thatcher’s act to abolish the council took effect), Talawa’s first production was The Black Jacobins by Caribbean writer CLR James, a play that had not been performed in England for 50 years.
Talawa went on to become Britain’s longest-running black theatre company, staging plays by Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde,
Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller, which gave black actors and directors who were overlooked in the mainstream a chance to broaden their repertoire. The company also produced plays by black writers including Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Tariq Ali.
The Black Jacobins starred Norman Beaton as the black Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture alongside Hammond, and the pair teamed up again in 1990 in the Channel 4 TV sitcom Desmond’s, which also starred her Talawa co-founder, Carmen Munroe.
Hammond was appointed OBE in 2005. She is survived by a son, Matthew Saunders, from her marriage between 1965 and 1987 to Michael Saunders.
Mona Hammond was born Mavis Chin in Clarendon parish, Jamaica, to a Chinese father and Jamaican mother. She moved to Britain in 1959 and took a secretarial job at the architectural practice Norman and Dawbarn. After two years of evening classes at the City Literary Institute in London, she won a scholarship to Rada.
Her first significant TV role came with Wolcott (1980-81), a four-part mini-series in which she played the wife of a black detective hero, fighting racism and drug dealing in east London. In addition to Desmond’s and EastEnders, there were roles in Juliet Bravo, Casualty, Coronation Street, Holby City, Doctor Who and The Bill.
In the early 1990s she spent two years at the National Theatre, appearing in Peer Gynt and The Crucible, but her most headlininggrabbing stage appearance came in 1974 when she appeared at the Royal Court in a five-week run of Play Mas, the first play written by her friend Matura. At the end of the run, she rewarded herself with a holiday in Tunisia, unaware that the play had been so successful that it was about to win a West End transfer.
When the producers were unable to contact her, the British consul was deployed to track her down and she was eventually handed a pile of increasingly desperate telegrams, the last of which read: ‘‘You’re booked to appear at the Phoenix and the first night is tonight.’’
It took three hastily arranged flights to get her to Heathrow, but she made it, arriving at the theatre 90 seconds before the curtain went up. ‘‘When I opened the telegrams I had the shock of my life. I never thought I’d make it,’’ she said. –
actor b January 1, 1931
d July 4, 2022
Her first lead role, in 1970 as Lady Macbeth in an allblack production . . . felt like