There is hardly a branch of the arts in which dancer, choreographer, graphic artist, costume designer, actor, stage director, photographer, musician, and writer Geoffrey Holder (b. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1 August 1930) has not made his mark.
Known primarily as the Tony®-winning stage director and costume designer of Broadway’s The Wiz (1975), and for his performance as Baron Samedi in the James Bond thriller Live and Let Die (1973), he is remembered also as Punjab in Annie (1982), and as the Genie in Cole Porter and S.J. Perelman’s television musical Aladdin (1954). At a towering 6’6” and with his Trinidadian basso and hearty laugh (“Mahvelous! Ha ha ha ha!”), he was a durably popular presence on TV in the 1970s and -80s 7-Up “Uncola” advertising campaigns.
Holder was one of four children in an urban middle-class family. He attended The Tranquillity School and secondary school at Queens Royal College in Port-of-Spain, while receiving lessons in painting and dancing from his older brother Boscoe. Geoffrey joined the Holder Dance Company under his brother’s direction when he was but seven years old, and when Boscoe moved to Europe ten years later to embark on what was to be a very successful career in entertainment, Geoffrey Holder took over the company’s leadership.
Almost immediately, Holder’s impressive stature and personal elegance (his father, he said, had advised him before leaving home, “Don’t go to New York looking for atmosphere; you must take it with you”) caught the attention of producer Arnold Saint Subber and he was hired to appear in Harold Arlen’s Broadway musical House of Flowers.
In 1956 he formed his own troupe, Geoffrey Holder and Company, and for about a week at the beginning of 1957, he played Lucky in an All-Black Cast of Waiting for Godot, his non-dance theatrical debut. Meanwhile, he was continuing to paint, and that year won a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting.
None of these screen triumphs stood in the way of Geoffrey Holder’s continuing presence and success on Broadway. In 1964 both he and wife Carmen de Lavallade performed in Josephine Baker’s brief revue appearance on Broadway (40 performances), and in 1975 Holder won lasting fame as the director and costume designer of The Wiz, the all-black musical version of The Wizard of Oz. The show ran for over four years, 1672 performances, and won Holder two Tony Awards®, for direction and costume design. (He was the first black man ever to be nominated in either category.) The Wiz was revived briefly in 19840.
In 1978 Holder directed another original musical, Timbuktu!, which, at 221 performances, did less well, but nonetheless gained a Tony® nomination (for costumes) and two Drama Desk nominations (costumes and choreography) for Holder – he was also the designer for its Playbill cover illustration. Timbuktu! was a revival, after a fashion, of Robert Wright and George Forrest’s Kismet, with its Alexander Borodin themes generously interlarded with elements of African folk music.
As a choreographer Geoffrey Holder has created dances and done staging for many companies, including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Dance Theatre of Harlem, and The Boys’ Choir of Harlem and Friends. The last decade has seen at least two film documentaries featuring him, Geoffrey Holder: The Unknown Side by Andrzej Krakowski in 2002, and Joséphine Baker: Black Diva in a White Man’s World by Annette von Wangenheim in 2006. A massive coffee-table book with 250 illustrations, Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theater, Dance and Art, by Jennifer Dunning, was published by Abrams in 2002.