Melvin Van Peebles
(August 21, 1932 – September 21, 2021)
Pioneering filmmaker behind “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and father of director and actor Mario Van Peebles.
He was an American actor, filmmaker, writer, and composer. He worked as an active filmmaker into the 2000s. 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, as 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 him the interest of Hollywood studios, leading to his American feature debut Watermelon Man, in 1970. Eschewing further overtures from Hollywood, he used the successes he had so far to bankroll his work as an independent filmmaker.
In 1971, he released his best-known work, creating and starring in the film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, considered one of the earliest and best-regarded examples of the blaxploitation genre. He followed this up with the musical, Don’t Play Us Cheap, based on his own stage play, and continued to make films, write novels and stage plays in English and in French through the next several decades; his final films include the French-language film Le Conte du ventre plein (2000) and the absurdist film Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (2008). His son, filmmaker, and actor Mario Van Peebles, appeared in several of his works and portrayed him in the 2003 biographical film Baadasssss!.
Education
Born Melvin Peebles in Chicago, Illinois, he was the son of Edwin Griffin and Marion Peebles.In 1953 Peebles graduated with a B.A. in literature from Ohio Wesleyan University.He served in the Air Force as a navigator-bombardier for three years.
Van Peebles experimented with career as a painter, and, growing appalled by the racist portrayal of African Americans in movies, made some film shorts as an amateur in the late ’50s and early ’60s. He did stints as a postal worker and, in San Francisco, a cable-car grip — about which he wrote his first book, “The Big Heart,” in 1957. He spent some time in Mexico; in Holland he studied astronomy at the University of Amsterdam and acting at the Dutch National Theater.
Peebles was married once, to the German-born actress and photographer Maria Marx, in the 1950s, but the marriage ended in divorce after several years.
Peebles died on September 21, 2021, at his home in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 89.
In addition to son Mario, he is survived by son Max Van Peebles, an occasional actor and assistant director, daughter Marguerite, and grandchildren. His daughter Megan pre-deceased him.