Walking with Dick Gregory down the mile-long wooden promenade in Wilmington is an interesting experience. At that time, he would only sign "To You". Bolden! has a strong cast, including Anthony Mackie and Jackie Earle Haley Barry Papick, its distinguished acting coach, describes Gregory's performance as "incredible".ĭick Gregory almost never gives interviews, and I first experienced his extreme caution when dealing with strangers a few years ago when I approached him with an album sleeve for an autograph for my six-year-old son. Gregory plays him in this last, traumatic stage of his life. Bolden, a chronic alcoholic and schizophrenic, was committed to a mental institution at 30, where he remained until his death, 24 years later.
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Gregory, 78, is here on location for Dan Pritzker's film Bolden! Hugely anticipated, not least because Pritzker has invested several years and a considerable budget in its preparation, the movie tells the story of the legendary New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, whose tragic life loosely inspired the 1976 Michael Ondaatje book, Coming Through Slaughter. We meet in the picturesque town of Wilmington, on the Cape Fear River, North Carolina. It's fortunate that his life has been played out so publicly, because Dick Gregory is a character it would be impossible to render credible in fiction. "The choice in 1968," Gregory recalls, "was between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace and me."Īll of the qualities that a man might seek to cultivate - courage, humour, intelligence, dignity and stamina - radiate from him at an unusually intense level. Gregory is also the only black man apart from Barack Obama to have ever stood in the final round of a presidential election an independent candidate with the support of, among others, Hunter S Thompson.
Gregory sings backing vocals on "Give Peace A Chance" John Lennon was a close friend, and it was a prayer book given to Yoko Ono by Gregory, Lennon claimed, that inspired him to write "Imagine". "Dick," Pryor told me, shortly before his death in 2005, "was the greatest, and he was the first.
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