Post by *markster*I recently discovered that the actress who played Cassie Charlton (Mick'
Sister-in-law, worked in the garage) Ebony Gray has passed away.
Don't know the cause.
Cancer.
From: http://www.caribvoice.org/Transitions/deaths.html
Ebony Gray
London, August 23, 2003: From 1996 to 1998 Ebony Gray, who has died of
cancer aged 49, played the loving but uncompromising Cassie Charlton on
Channel 4's Brookside. The part changed her life. She recalled that, before,
when she went in Liverpool shops, the reason why the security guards had
followed her around was because she was was black. Post-Brookside, it was
because they wanted her autograph.
After the soap opera she collaborated with writer Barbara Phillips to create
Ebony's Album - a musical which drew on her Scottish, Irish, African and
Caribbean ancestry across five generations. Ebony starred in this, along
with Margie Clarke and Louis Emerick, at Liverpool's Neptune Theatre in
2000. Two years later she was commissioned by Granada TV to devise and
present My Liverpool, a personal portrait of her native city.
But her higher profile never diminished her less public but equally valuable
work. In 2002 she was still running weekly Women Of Strength workshops with
a group of mature black women, and other workshops with young people.
Ebony began her community-based education work in 1978, when she went to
lead a drama group at Granby Primary School (now Kingsley community school)
in Toxteth, where she had been a pupil. She repeated this initiative at the
Merseyside Caribbean Centre (where the voices of the youthful participants
mingled with the sounds of domino playing by the older residents) and also
at the Methodist youth centre. Youngsters participating in these workshops
gained insights from recreating the real-life dramas of local history,
including racial conflicts.
In the 1980s, she worked on the club and pub circuit, appeared with groups
such as as Steel'n'Skin and Osibisa, and was resident singer at the Grafton
Rooms in Liverpool, singing soul, jazz and her own compositions.
Ebony's career changed dramatically in the 1990s, when operations to correct
a foot injury instead led her to be registed as a disabled person. She
became a member of the Arts Council's Disability Monitoring Committee, and a
presenter and writer for the TV programme From The Edge, produced by the
BBC's Disability Programmes Unit. And then there was Brookside.
Largely raised by her Liverpudlian mother - her Trinidadian father was a
sailor, and often away at sea - Ebony trained as a performer with the Watts
Repertory Company in Los Angeles, the first black repertory company in the
America. She left Liverpool in 1974 as Carole Williams, and returned in 1978
as Ebony, because the name was "powerful and strong". The 1965 Watts civil
rights riots and the 1981Toxteth riots also influenced her perception of
race and society.
In May she married Martin Ryan. He survives her as does her daughter from a
previous marriage, Tammy, three grandchildren, two brothers and a sister.
· Ebony (Carolyn Anne) Gray, actor and activist, born January 25 1954; died
August 8 2003
--
Trish
Dublin, Ireland