Just a couple of weeks after the sad death of Richard "Jaws" Kiel, the James Bond pantheon has lost another of its iconic villains. Geoffrey Holder, who played Baron Samedi to unsettling effect in 1973's Live And Let Die, has passed away from complications stemming from pneumonia. He was 84.
There was much more to Holder than voodoo henchmen. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he began his career as a dancer aged just 7, and by the time he was 22 was teaching at the Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York. Four years later he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work as a painter, whilst still finding time to work as a principal dancer with New York's Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He made his Broadway debut in 1954 in the musical House Of Flowers (co-written by Truman Capote), and co-starred in an all-black Waiting For Godot in 1957.
His first (uncredited) film role arrived in 1962 in All Night Long, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello. Afterwards he began to find himself typecast, thanks to his deep voice and imposing screen presence (he was 6'6"), as "exotics" in movies like Doctor Dolittle (as native leader Willie Shakespeare), Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (as the Sorceror), and in the 1960s Tarzan TV series.
The apex of those roles was, of course, his turn in Roger Moore's Bond debut Live And Let Die. In Ian Fleming's novel, villain Mr Big himself was thought by some to be a personification of the big voodoo bad, but in the film he became a separate character: a peculiar henchman with a half-white face and a top hat. Uniquely in the Bond movies, he actually appears to be supernatural. He survives almost certain death in a coffin full of snakes to end the film laughing on the front of a train{
After the Baron, Holder returned to the stage, winning Tony Awards for the direction and costume design of the all-black Wizard Of Oz musical The Wiz. He continued to create dance pieces for the likes of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the Dance Theatre of Harlem while his film work slowed, but he appeared in Annie in 1982, and in Boomerang with Eddie Murphy in 1992. He also published a book of his photography in 1986.
Holder's was the sonorous voice narrating Tim Burton's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory in 2005, and his final screen credit, again as narrator, was the childrens' animation The Little Wizard: Guardian Of The Magic Crystals in 2008.
He met his wife, dancer Carmen de Lavallade, during House Of Flowers' run, and they married in 1955 (they were the subject of the film Carmen And Geoffrey in 2004). He is survived by her, and by their son Leo Anthony Lamont, and our thoughts are with them. Our regards, man.