Ivan Dixon, 76; actor's roles reflected life for blacks
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.
Longtime friend and colleague Sidney Poitier said Dixon has left his mark on American film, television and theater.
"As a fellow actor, one had to be on one's toes, otherwise he was quite likely to walk away with the scene," Poitier said in a statement released to The Times.
"Nothing but a Man," which also starred jazz singing great Abbey Lincoln as Josie, was written by two white documentary filmmakers who spent time in the South in the 1960s before penning the script. Long after its initial release, Dixon continued to see the movie as an example of film's potential to more accurately reflect black life. He encouraged the making of more honest films.
"Even among black directors today -- and I'm not saying these guys haven't done good work -- there is more concern with making movies that make money, that titillate and get people to the box office," he told Newsday in 1993. "And I think that is the kind of horror of black American life, that we have accepted that struggle for the dollar instead of struggling for humanity. For honor."
Born in New York on April 6, 1931, Dixon began acting at Lincoln Academy, an African American boarding school in Gaston County, N.C. At North Carolina Central University, he majored in theater and graduated in 1954, the same year he married theater student Berlie Ray. The couple later had four children. In addition to his wife and daughter, Dixon is survived by son Alan Kimara Dixon of Oakland. Two other sons died.
