Pearl Prescod’s star soared high in her day. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she became the first Black actor to play with the National Theatre company, under Laurence Olivier, in London in 1965. She appeared in the West End and on television, recorded radio plays, worked on the cabaret circuit and was also a prominent activist alongside Claudia Jones and Amy Ashwood Garvey. So why isn’t Prescod better known today?
Partly because her career was cut short by an untimely death – she had a brain haemorrhage at the age of 46, just a year after her breakthrough National Theatre role. But those excavating her forgotten legacy today think there is more to it than that. Coming to Britain in 1954, aged 34, on a music scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she was part of a larger group of well-educated, highly politicised Caribbean figures who arrived in the postwar era to make similarly impressive strides in culture and in consciousness-raising around race but whose names have since been forgotten.
