Actor and dancer.
Born: August 1, 1930; Died: October 5, 2014.
Geoffrey Holder, who has died aged 84, played one of the few James Bond villains to survive a meeting with 007. Bond seemed to kill Baron Samedi not once, but twice in Live and Let Die (1973). But the film ends with Samedi riding on the front of Bond's train, laughing diabolically, his face half black and half painted a ghostly white.
It was a bold departure for the Bond series to introduce a seemingly supernatural character, a voodoo personification of death. And, as Samedi, Holder is a genuinely terrifying apparition.
Six feet six inches tall, with a deep bass voice and rumbling, unsettling laugh, Holder played other exotic film characters, including the island ruler William Shakespeare the Tenth in Doctor Dolittle (1967) and the Indian servant Punjab in Annie (1982).
But he was also a highly accomplished dancer and choreographer, a Tony-winning Broadway director and a sufficiently impressive artist for his work to be exhibited at New York's Guggenheim Museum.
The son of a salesman, Geoffrey Lamont Holder was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1930. His elder brother Boscoe Holder also became a successful artist and dancer. As a boy Holder suffered from a serious stammer, but he found expression in dance and when he was seven he began dancing with his brother's company.
He arrived in New York in 1953 and made his Broadway debut in 1954 in the musical House of Flowers, in which he played a version of the traditional voodoo character Baron Samedi.
While working on House of Flowers he met Carmen de Lavallade, a dancer, choreographer and actress.
They were married the following year.
Also in 1955, he became a principal dancer with New York's Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
Holder reprised the character of Baron Samedi almost 20 years later when the writers decided to develop the voodoo elements in Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die novel and shifted much of the story to the fictitious Caribbean island of San Monique.
Samedi is a mysterious character. One minute he is appearing in a show for tourists, the next he is sitting in a cemetery playing the flute and in the climax of the film he literally rises from the grave at a voodoo sacrifice ceremony. Bond shoots him and when he reappears he knocks him into a coffin full of snakes. But still Samedi survives.
Neither Moore nor Holder were as fearless as they seemed - Moore revealed in his memoirs that both felt very uncomfortable with the snakes. Holder also choreographed the voodoo dance scenes and jazz funeral processions in Live and Let Die.
In 1975 he won Tony awards for directing and costume design on the original Broadway production of The Wiz, the African-American version of The Wizard of Oz, later filmed with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.
He came to Glasgow with the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1989 and presented several works, including Dougla (sic), which he composed, designed and choreographed. It centred on a mixed-race Caribbean wedding.
Subsequently he played one of Eddie Murphy's advertising colleagues in Boomerang (1992) and was narrator in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). However his main focus remained dance.
He is survived by his wife and son.
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