In the LA Times [1], this morning:
In the script for the landmark 1964 film “Nothing but a Man,” actor Ivan Dixon saw something familiar in the character Duff Anderson.
Duff was a railroad worker in love with Josie, a schoolteacher and minister’s daughter who lived in an Alabama town. The story of Duff’s attempts to live with dignity and to love, despite racial injustice, was an honest depiction of black life in America, Dixon said. The character, which Dixon later called the most important role he portrayed, resonated in a way that others did not.
“That was me,” Dixon once said of Duff. “I had lived every moment. . . . I was reliving my whole life on film.”
Dixon, who also played Sgt. James Kinchloe on the popular television series “Hogan’s Heroes,” and went on to a long career as a director of episodic television shows and feature films, including “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” died Sunday at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte, N.C. He was 76.
The cause of death was a brain hemorrhage, a complication of kidney disease, said his daughter, Doris Nomathande Dixon.
Ya know, hard as I try, I can’t seem to imagine him at 76.