I remember her writing about the script in her book. I've always wanted to read it. I love Altman but think Resnais would've been perfect.

Incidentally, she and Ellen Bethea (Rachel #1) played the same madwoman role in Funnyhouse Of A Negro onstage, decades apart.

That photo does pop out at you, the print, and also, you wonder if she's going to pop out.

Exactly.

Vee, that's interesting, they do share a physical resemblance.

few people and Ellen's hopes are still high.

Among all of the other problems confronting Ellen is the fact that her original title, "The Sorcerer," which she had copyrighted in 1968, is now being used by William Friedkin for his new film. "It seems that a copyright does not protect a title," says Ellen. "As of now I can't call it that anymore, even though it was its name for the last twelve years. The name comes from a quote by Novalis that says, 'The greatest of sorcerers will be the one that casts a spell on himself which is very meaningful in terms of what my life is about," she says.

Ellen is so involved in her dream that she jokingly says "they'll soon be carting me off to the sanitarium! People who know me are presently distressed with the involvement of time and emotion that I focus on it." But Ellen's film is so real and alive to her, that it makes her life more worth living.

Why, I asked Ellen, are you devoting so much time to this? It took her four years to write it and eight years trying to have it filmed. Her answer was quick and confident. "There are an awful lot of people who don't feel they have any kind of purpose in their life; and I feel that it is a goal worth accomplishing. Film is very important to me; it always was. Some of the things that I could not see as a child and that I hungered to see, I want children of today to be able to come to me for."

It's not only that Ellen is fascinated by this very interesting history, which most black people don't even know about, even though it's part of their own history, it's the whole thing. Ellen's feelings about the films are very strong. She feels film should be thrilling - able to drown your thoughts in a whirlpool so that you completely lose yourself and escape your own reality.

This film of Ellen's is much more than just a project; it goes way deeper. She feels that she had a calling to do this. Although she is not a religious person in the true sense of going to church and singing hymns every Sunday, she is religious in her own way. "I'm turned off by people who want to save their own soul for an afterlife. I'm interested primarily in what one can do here on earth to make life as healthy and positive and rewarding as possible."

Besides her involvement with her film, which is uppermost in her mind and her life, Ellen doesn't feel the necessity to go out all the time. She has numerous friends but prefers to stay home where she can think and relax.

Her feelings regarding marriage are very strong. "I never felt that I had to get married," she says. "I had a lot of girlfriends who felt they had to get married and they panicked. I was very romantic and I thought that the most wonderful thing in the world was to marry someone you were insane about. But that was the only reason to marry as far as I was concerned. If that person didn't come along, I didn't feel compelled to get married. In an actual survey I read about love, it stated that love for women was about third down on the list. The first reason to marry was financial security and the second was emotional security. The truth of it is that most women are not married to their grand passion; they're married to their best offer."

The last person Ellen really cared about went to California and is working out there. "We're very dear friends," she says, "and that's all we are. His name is J.A. Preston, and he's in a new TV series with Bernadette Peters, 'All's Fair.' We haven't seen each other in a long time, but we do keep in touch. And I wish him all the best with his new show."

Ellen admits that she "hates to cook" and relies on the "No Cookbook" a lot. "I eat a lot of salads since I'm alone so much of the time." By and large though, Ellen says, "I get up, do what I have to do around the house, read the Times, do the puzzle, and go to work." Ellen is not interested in pursuing her career, she has no agent and does not want one. She has turned down many parts and TV commercials. Her whole life is revolving around her film - her dream.

Her family is very close to her though, and she relies on their support. She has a sister and parents whom she worships. "We're a very close-knit family. They are very supportive of me. At the very beginning they were terribly upset to see me go into theatre, but after a couple of years when they saw that I was succeeding, they became very comforting."

As far as her political views are concerned, Ellen feels "there are fewer and fewer options open to us politically. I used to think that it used to be a way of possibly getting things done, but I feel like of turned off with politics now."

As for Ellen's feelings regarding the future, "I can take care of myself; I can clothe myself, put a roof over my head, and don't have to attach myself to anybody to do this for me. I feel my status in the community, being acknowledged as having accomplished something in life; all these things I can get for myself, because I've earned them."

- JUDIE BURSTEIN

I know all this is already known, most likely, but I do like the photos, and hey, we're back in 1971!

February 1971 TV Radio Show.

Island. We know she used to keep an old notebook with the information, but we were never able to find it when she died."

The story of Ellen Holly's heritage is a long and complex one, tracing lines into England and France as well as into the culture of the American Indian and the princes of black Africa.

The story of Ellen Holly the actress is 16 years of what she describes as "long, hard, bitter struggle." It is the story of a talent so evidently pitted against her heritage that ABC-TV television was prompted to make a documentary film about her life and work for its Like It Is series.

Now she is playing regularly as Carla Benari in One Life to Live. "But if and when that ends I shall have the same problems I have always had," she said, "out here in the blue yonder wondering where the next meal is coming from. You see, I am completely uncastable for commercial theater."

For, in today's society, Ellen's fascinating ancestry brings only bitterness and frustration. Her skin is light but her culture is black America. "The problem is that if you are black, people will not hire you for white roles and they will not hire me for black roles because they tell me I look like white. So I'm in a bind, neither one thing nor the other and they have absolutely no use for people like me whatsoever.

"But I've said this many times before - people are tired of hearing it. And I'm tired of having the problem."

She rose suddenly, bringing a tray of grapes and cherries out to the balcony of her fourth-floor, New York apartment, in a building recently converted from six brownstones on the upper West Side.

The apartment is quiet and simple. When you leave you take along an impression of summery prints on the long sofas, big, uncluttered paintings on the walls, small filing cabinets that neatly store her business matters, all handled in a simple, matter-of-fact way.

Ellen has never married. "One becomes so used to living alone, so used to being emotionally dependent on oneself..."

Asked about her age, Ellen said: "I wish I could afford to say. If there is anything I cannot bear it's women who are coy about their age. But I am in a business where nobody has any imagination, where as soon as you say you are 22 they will not hire you for a 23-year old part. I could hope that one day I'll be...powerful enough to call my own shots. If that day should ever come, one of the first things I'm going to do is tell my age.

"Women I find attractive and I would like to turn into are women who accept their age gracefully, like Simone Signoret, Coleen Dewhurst. Coleen is stunning.

Ellen grew up in Richmond Hill, Queens, in a "great, big house" where her family had been for 50 years. "The house was too big," she said, "we were all going our separate ways."

But, she said slowly, "it's strange to leave a place that has been your family's home for 50 years. I wouldn't want to go back, to look at it, it would make me feel depressed. The things that are the same remind you of old memories, the things that have been changed you find disturbing. I understand the new owners have built a fence around the house. I find that unsettling.

"I feel," she said slowly that summer evening, "I feel, you might even say, cynical. I feel that the 16 years of constant struggle and hard work, have, frankly, so exhausted me that there are great areas I no longer care about. For instance I no longer care about the theater at all."

And yet, Ellen has become what is considered to be a successful actress - prominent on and off Broadway and in television and repertory. Her Broadway credits include To Late the Phalarope, in which she appeared in the lead role opposite Barry Sullivan. Off-Broadway she has appeared opposite James Earl Jones in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. She also was leading lady with the New York Shakespeare Festival, including the role of Lady Macbeth opposite Jones' Macbeth.

Ellen was a leading lady with the National Repertory Theatre when they reopened the restored Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago - for the first time since the assassination there of President Lincoln.

"In all of the shows I have done on Broadway I have been asked by the management to wear make-up to make me black, darker. The only time I was permitted to go on stage as myself was when there was an evening of poetry and song at the Longacre where eight black performers were reading as themselves, James Earl Jones, Gloria Foster, Cicely Tyson, Josephine Premica, Moses Gunn, Leon Bibb, Roscoe Lee Browne and myself.

"It was a lovely evening in the theater. People came because they felt it was their sociological duty to come, and surprised themselves by having one of the best times in the theater they had ever had. The audiences began to build so rapidly on a basis of word of mouth. And if the management hadn't had to put the thing together on a shoe-string, had been able to wait it out, it could have been a glorious success." The experience was later recorded and released as a two-record album, A Hand is on the Gate.

"The economics of Broadway theater are so stringent that they can produce only a certain kind of play - one that will have a chance of bringing in the kind of audience to which it is geared. And that audience is usually a white, middle-class, expense-account audience. When you are running theater for so limited a strata of people the theater becomes just as limited."

For Ellen Holly the limitations have been serious. "I went into the theater to be an actress," she said. "And to be an actress you have to play any number of roles. You will never hone your instrument to a place where it can function if you restrict yourself to roles that have been written for black women because then you're really in trouble: the roles that have been written for black women, with one or two exceptions, are so limited and so circumscribed and shallow and idiotic, that it would be impossible to learn a craft by playing only those two roles."

She paused and in a moment said quickly: "I feel absolutely pulverized with all the pushes and the pulls and the excitements and the depression and the worries and the insecurities and the struggles and what-have-you. The theater has pushed me and pulled me and strung me out like a rubber band.

"For me the commercial theater has no excitement. It is not about anything relevant. It could all just drop into some chasm in the earth and it would not bother me one iota! My head has gone on to another place."

She smiled suddenly, as if excited by her own thoughts. "I have written a film," Ellen Holly said. "I'm writing, writing. I get up at six in the morning and write, write every day."

The film is, for now, a secret, its story known only to a few close friends. The production of Ellen's film is becoming one of the most important goals of her life.

"There are many reasons why I want the film to be done and one is because I remember how I was conditioned. I remember the kind of film I used to see when I was a child and how it warped my sense of myself. The kind of black you saw on film when I was a child was terrifying.

"if I could get done a film that a whole generation of children could go into a theater and see, and come out of that theater with a vastly different sense of themselves than I had, and see what is possible to them and what they are, I feel I would have accomplished something."

Although she has finished work on the script, Ellen's writing is by no means completed. "I'm going to have to write it as a book first," she said. "i resent the fact that I have to turn it into a book. I'm beginning to get bitter about how constantly one has to make detours...I suppose that is what everyone goes through. But I do feel that for black people things are still longer and harder and doors are always closed."

She clasped her long, ringless hands one over the other. "In the long years of struggle I have got a much more realistic attitude towards goals," she said. "I find it so hard to drive forward in this society that I realize I have to be extremely specific about my goals and I have to drive them with an intensity that is almost inhuman.

"So that goal towards which I'm headed is not to be 'an actress in films' - that is something for Raquel Welch or people to whom many films are available. It is not to be 'a writer for films' - that is for other people who find it easier to get a hearing in this society.

"For me I have one, single goal: to see the film done. I have written a film that I consider terribly important and if it ever got done I think that I would accomplish a great deal in terms of social responsibilities and artistic responsibilities. I do think that it is a very significant and important film - and there are people whose artistic judgment I respect who also think so. Kenneth Tynan was the first person to read the script and to say ' this is extraordinary.'"

Her fine, intelligent face was coming alive as she warmed to her subject. She had been uninterested in talking about herself but this was something closer to her heart. She took this opportunity to give us some insight about the nature of the film without giving away the actual story. The emotions that make acting the art is is, started to emerge in a fresh way.

"The film does relate to the business of being black," she said. "But on a level that has not been gone into too often. It seems to me that most of the things that deal with black, deal with black in a very simplistic kind of way, in a sociological, problematical kind of way. And end up being messages. I am dreadfully bored with that.

"I am much more interested in the emotional complexity of the thing, not in terms of bringing a 'message' but in terms of the whole texture of the experience and how it relates not only to people who are black but to people who are white and brown and yellow...There are certain universal human things that happen to people and black is interesting to me not as an end in itself but as a way of illuminating something larger.

"What I care about and what any artist should care about, is the truth. Most films, most theater, most media in this country, have always looked at things from a white point of view. I am interested in looking at things from a black point of view (not to instruct the populace in what it must know sociologically, but so that it will be possible to get a second perspective, to get closer that what the thing really is..."

Ellen stood silhouetted against the New York skyline, shivering slightly in the cool of the evening.

"People don't have a realistic idea of what blacks in this country are," she said. "They vary from place to place depending on the history of any part of the country."

"America is a country where blacks and whites have lived together for some 300 years and whether or not people like to admit it there has been some miscegenation and the population is now mixed.

"I think," she said seriously, "that it is extremely hypocritical of white Southerners to keep talking about how they must keep the races separate so they don't have a mongrel race in this country because they are the very ones, in the days of slavery, who contributed most to the mongrel race that is already here. I consider myself one of the mongrel race. One of the reasons I look like I do, is because my great-grandfather's father was his master."

Her voice betrayed some of the latent fury that seethes behind her cool, proud beauty. "Anger? It's not very buried I'm afraid. It's much too close to the surface," she said. "My life's problem has been trying to channel it into something meaningful.

"One of the things that people seem to imagine is that black people are busy stirring themselves up - or worse, that other people are busy stirring them up. It is completely the opposite. Anybody who is as angry as black people are in this country knows how anger can destroy you. If you are black you spend most of your life trying to hold the anger down, to control it.

"Many blacks have been very successfully programmed by America into having very divisive attitudes towards one another. That's one of the reasons why it has been difficult to get ourselves together. But we're getting it together," said Ellen Holly. "Little by little we're getting it together."