Lonne Elder III

Lonne Elder III (December 26, 1927 – June 11, 1996) was an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter born in Americus, Georgia, to Lonne Elder II and Quincy Elder. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression, and his mother encouraged him to read from an early age. Orphaned young, Elder was raised by an aunt and uncle in Jersey City, New Jersey, alongside his four siblings. His uncle worked as a numbers runner, and Elder accompanied him on his rounds collecting betting slips. Elder enrolled at the New Jersey State Teachers' College in Trenton in 1949 but left before completing his freshman year, subsequently relocating to Harlem, where he took classes at the New School for Social Research and became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1952 he was drafted into the United States Army and served for two years.

After returning from military service, Elder immersed himself in the Harlem literary scene, receiving encouragement from poets Robert Hayden and Langston Hughes. He pursued work as a stage actor and, in 1959, was cast as Bobo in the original Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, a role he held through 1960. His friendship with dramatist Douglas Turner Ward, with whom he shared an apartment, helped inspire him to write a play titled A Hysterical Turtle in a Rabbit Race in 1961, an early exploration of his recurring theme of the Black family in a hostile America. In 1965 he appeared in a production of his play Day of Absence, and that same year Ceremonies in Dark Old Men received a reading at Wagner College on Staten Island. The reading led to a screenwriting fellowship at the Yale University School of Drama in 1966 and 1967. His one-act play Charades on East Fourth Street, depicting a confrontation between community members and police, was performed at the Expo '67 World's Fair in Montreal, Canada. Elder served as director of the Negro Ensemble Company's playwrights' division from 1967 to 1969.

When the Negro Ensemble Company launched its first season at New York's St. Mark's Playhouse in 1969, it selected Ceremonies in Dark Old Men for production. The play centers on a 1950s Harlem family: Russell B. Parker, a barber who reminisces about his past as a vaudeville dancer, his two unemployed sons who live on the edge of the law, and his daughter who resentfully supports the household. Ward portrayed Parker in the original production. Ceremonies was the runner-up for the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in drama and earned Elder a Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright. By the time of its 1985 revival, The New York Times described it as a contemporary classic. Subsequent productions of the play featured actors including Denzel Washington, Billy Dee Williams, Keith David, and Laurence Fishburne.

Elder married actress Judyann Elder in 1969, and the couple had a son, Christian. He relocated the family to Los Angeles to pursue a career writing for television and film. His first feature film assignment was adapting William H. Armstrong's novel Sounder into a screenplay directed by Martin Ritt. The film, about a poor family of Southern sharecroppers during the Great Depression and starring Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks, earned four nominations at the 45th Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Elder. In 1973, Elder and Suzanne de Passe became the first people of color nominated for Academy Awards in the screenwriting categories. Elder also wrote the sequel to Sounder. During the same period he scripted Melinda, a noir-infused crime melodrama starring Calvin Lockhart and Rosalind Cash. He also wrote A Woman Called Moses, a television miniseries about Harriet Tubman reuniting him with Tyson and featuring narration by Orson Welles, which earned Elder a Writers Guild of America Award and his second Christopher Award. In 1981, his collaboration with Richard Pryor produced the screenplay for Bustin' Loose, a comedy about an ex-felon who drives a busload of handicapped children to a farm. Elder and his wife welcomed a daughter, Loni-Christine, in 1980.

Elder had previously married Betty Gross in 1963; the couple had a son, David Dubois Elder, before divorcing four years later. Throughout his career he supported himself through acting, gambling, and other work while continuing to write. He died on June 11, 1996.