As one who always looks forward to a post from Birgit Kellner, I'm happy to "complicate" her latest question about a character's vs. an actor's race by way of something interesting brought up by Gloria Monti vis a vis Susan Kohner. (And wasn't Susan Kohner's brother an agent, like her father, Paul, whose name was, or who was called, "Pancho"?) When Alec Guinness plays a Japanese man in A MAJORITY OF ONE, or an Indian in A PASSAGE TO INDIA, or Richard Barthelmess a Chinese man in BROKEN BLOSSM, or Nils Aster a Chinese man in GENERAL YEN, or Woody Strode and Mike Mazurki also Chinese in Ford's SEVEN WOMEN, etc., etc., it seems clear that something is a bit amiss, as if interracial romance or sex is somehow too much for an audience and so must be mitigated by the "real" race of the actor. But this "real" race is surely more complicated, viz. the example of Susan Kohner, or, say, Ben Kingsley when he played GANDHI. Similarly, do we not become very "racialist" when we hold race itself as an inherent quality existing "out there" and inhering within the body, the image, of an actor? When Native Americans complain about "white" stars playing the "Indians," we sympathize, and when Native American actors are used in such roles, we applaud, but I think we need to be a bit careful about this in general, lest race become a defining characteristic in and of itself. DD ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]