How do actors Diana Sands and James Coburn culturally conflate? You’ll probably only figure that out by continuing to read this Monday’s RUBRICS. I’m not sure how many columnists would start their weeks not only contemplating such a cultural conflation, but also citing such actors in order to try to get new subscribers. Do people even remember them? Sands, an African American born in the Bronx, was a remarkable actress who died of cancer at the age of 39 in 1973. Cool-cat car-loving Coburn - film critic Pauline Kael once described him as looking like “the child of the liaison between Lt. Pinkerton and Madame Butterfly” - died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of 74 in his Beverly Hills home in the arms of his wife. Coburn, a marital arts aficionado, was a pallbearer at his friend Bruce Lee’s funeral in 1973. The pallbearers at Sands’s 1973 funeral included Ozzie Davis, Brock Peters, and Douglas Turner Ward.
Coburn was cast in the role of Corporal Steiner in director Sam Peckinpah’s 1977 film, Cross of Iron after Robert Shaw, initially cast, dropped out because of a dispute over money. In 1968, Sands played the title role in another kind of Shaw’s Saint Joan for Lincoln Center Repertory Company. Clive Barnes, reviewing her performance in The New York Times, used the embarrassingly cringe-worthy terms “the wisdom of the fields” to describe her interpretation of the role and “colored” to describe her. He wrote: “Miss Sands plays a peasant, a figure of balance and commonplace sensibility. Her wisdom is the wisdom of the fields, her faith is as natural to her as song is to an ascending lark. Moreover, the fact that she is colored adds a fortuitous yet theatrically not irrelevant forcefulness to her rebellion and subsequent prosecution. Her finely modulated voice, her wealth of anguish, and her perky dignity all help to fill out a portrayal, I thought, only needed a little less intensity in the first scenes to be extraordinarily convincing.”
TO READ THE REST OF THIS ESSAY AND SEE THE PHOTOS CURATED, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR.