A lady to the final curtain

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Actor Teddy Price, who plays an earnest cop doggedly trying to serve and protect in the land of the self-serving and protection rackets on the Jamaican soap Royal Palm Estate, falls back on a former Commodore in summing up the late Christine Bell.

Without singing.

"She was, as Lionel Richie would say, once, twice, three times a lady," Price said of the actress and theatre personality. He speaks from a unique perspective on Bell, who died at the Andrews Memorial Hospital, Hope Road, St Andrew, on Friday night. She was 59 years old.

Price played her little brother in Sala - Bell's professional theatre debut - was her sexual aggressor in The Rapist, did the silver screen in Royal Palm Estate (with admittedly less face-to-face contact) and went to New York (A Gift For Mom), London (Operation P) and maybe Canada (there have been so many productions) with her. It was in the land of Great Tom and the Thames that Bell's nurturing nature made a tremendous difference. "We had challenges and she helped us ride the difficulties," Price said. She had been in London before and knew her way around. Some of the things that could have been a problem were not because of Christine's presence," he said.

Media training

Bell did media training at the British Broadcasting Corporation, after working at the then Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in the early 1970s. She also trained at the Miami Dade Community College in the United States.

"She acted like a real mother, on and offstage," Price said.

President of the Jamaica Association of Dramatic Artists (JADA), Scarlette Beharie, counts Bell as her mentor - although, ironically, Bell was first vice-president in the same administration. Beharie said she saw Bell on the tail-end of her 30 to 35 years of regular stage stints in A Gift for Mom, which was followed by an eight-year break from the stage. Bell returned briefly in October 2010 with Josephine's Night Out, a one-woman play written by Basil Dawkins and produced by Beharie, in a benefit for the Theatre Artists Benevolent Fund.

Beharie said Bell had been spotted by renowned playwright and poet Dennis Scott. "She was this unknown girl from the country visiting her sister. Scott was there and he said 'you are it'," Beharie related. The 'it' was a "sophisticated country girl", and Bell duly made her debut in Slade Hopkinson's Sala.

Scott became, Beharie said, Bell's first and most influential director, Ginger Knight, Ed Wallace, Basil Dawkins and Jambiz team productions (especially Lenford Salmon) among the many others she worked with. She won three Actor Boy Awards for her leading theatre role - A Raisin in the Sun, Office Chase and State of Emergency.

"She was the consummate professional and she inspired everyone she worked with to rise to higher standards and to take themselves and their craft seriously and approach it with respect," Beharie said. Plus, Beharie said, Bell expanded her theatre role beyond the actual stage. "She would say she is just an actress, but behind the scenes she was so active," Beharie said.

Intelligent actress

Basil Dawkins, whose plays Couples, Power Play, A Gift for Mom and Josephine's Night Out Bell appeared in, counts Bell as "my actress. She was such an intelligent actress ... She brought clarity to the work even more so than the playwright when writing".

He said Bell went through a process with each script, and "throughout the process you were being enriched by her understanding of the deeper nuance of the work ... She was a magnificent, wonderful and flexible actress, who could deliver beyond your expectation and did in every performance".

There were times when Bell was called upon to deliver on another kind of expectation during a production, when spontaneity was required without the audience detecting a variation from the script. He said that every actor and actress goes through a blank spot, when they lose their place in the script. "She was always there to help you by throwing you a line, throwing you a move," Price said. "She always had everything under control."

"She had great respect for the theatre. She would not do anything half-heartedly. It was 150 per cent - at least."

And that seemed to apply to Bell outside the theatre as well. "That was the kind of person she was as a friend and a mentor," Beharie said. "When she was in your corner, she was in your corner."

In 2010 Bell told The Gleaner she was calling it quits on theatre. However, there would have been another return to the boards. "After doing Josephine's Night Out she was open to possibilities," Beharie said.

"We were thinking of stuff to do in theatre for Jamaica 50 ... . We were talking about it. We were going to do this amazing show in June."

Dawkins had planned an extended version of Josephine's Night Out with Bell and says he may still do it in her honour.

"Her contribution to JADA and theatre in Jamaica will not go unrecognised," Beharie said.