Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles was an American actor, filmmaker, playwright, novelist, and composer.

His feature film debut, The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967), was based on his own French-language novel La Permission and was shot in France,because it was difficult for a black American director to get work at the time. The film won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival which gained the interest of Hollywood studios, leading to his American feature debut Watermelon Man, in 1970. He used his early successes to finance his work as an independent filmmaker.

Van Peebles also appeared in such films as Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs (1985), Jaws: The Revenge (1987), Reginald Hudlin’s Boomerang (1992), Last Action Hero (1993), The Hebrew Hammer (2003) and Peeples (2013).

On television, he starred with his son Mario on the short-lived Stephen J. Cannell NBC comedy Sonny Spoon and appeared on All My Children, In the Heat of the Night, Living Single, and Girlfriends.

Van Peebles won a Daytime Emmy and a Humanitas Prize in 1987 for writing an episode of a CBS Schoolbreak Special, “The Day They Came to Arrest the Books.” He also was the author of Bold Money, a 1986 primer on how to trade stock options.

He continued to work as an active filmmaker into the 2000s.

Van Peebles died September 21, 2021 in Manhattan, New York. He was 89.