Rebecca Hall is a pretty actress you’ve probably seen in movies such as Ben Affleck’s The Town.
Her father was Sir Peter Hall, the titanic English stage and opera director who helmed the first English-language production of Waiting for Godot and founded the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Her mother is American soprano Maria Ewing. Ewing’s most famous role was doing the dance of the seven veils in Richard Strauss’s opera Salome while removing all seven veils.
Hall looks like a white woman, but her mother is obviously part black.
But, apparently, nobody seemed to mention to Hall that her mother was part black. From the New York Times:
The Secret Toll of Racial Ambiguity
Rebecca Hall’s new film adaptation of the 1929 novel “Passing” has cracked open a public conversation about colorism and privilege.
By Alexandra Kleeman
Oct. 20, 2021… Raised in England within the elite circles of classical theater, Hall, who is 39, had her first introduction to the concept of racial “passing” in the pages of Larsen’s novel. “I was spending time in America, and I knew that there had been vague, but I mean really vague, talk about my mother’s ethnicity,” Hall explained over the phone this spring. … “Sometimes she would intimate that maybe there was African American ancestry, or sometimes she would intimate that there was Indigenous ancestry. But she didn’t really know; it wasn’t available to her.”
… After her parents divorced in 1990, Hall lived for many years with her mother in a manor in the English countryside, where she remembers rooms filled with the sound of jazz on vinyl, her mother making herself at home in the relative isolation and remoteness of an adopted country. “I was sort of brought up to believe that I was this — all of which is true, by the way — privileged, upper-middle-class, sort of bohemian well-educated white girl from a very prestigious family background,” Hall said. “And that was sort of where it stopped. And when I asked questions to my mother about her background in Detroit and her family,” Hall said, her voice low and firm, “she left it with an ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past.’”
Until a friend pointed her to Nella Larsen’s “Passing,”
Passing is a 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel by a part-Danish part-black lady whose husband was the second African-American physics Ph.D. It’s about two women of part-black ancestry, one of whom is married to a black doctor, one of whom is passing for white and is married to a rich white man.
That part is based on the tabloid-fodder 1925 court case in which a scion of the Dutch Old Money Rhinelander family of New York attempted to get his marriage to a maid annulled on the grounds that she didn’t tell him she was part black. Her attorney pointed out she didn’t tell him she wasn’t black, and, c’mon, he argued, just look at her.
The jury agreed.
In the book, the woman who isn’t passing is tempted to try it, while the one who is passing for white discovers that she finds 1920s Harlem black parties more fun than Upper East Side white parties.
Lesbian feminist English professors love Passing because it shows that race is socially constructed etc. etc., plus they think it’s really, deep down, that the two ladies are lesbians passing as married women, hubba hubba.
Hall had no way of naming her intuition that these gaps in her family history were narratively charged — but reading it was a “gut punch.” “I felt deeply challenged and confused,” Hall recalled. …
And it had to have Black women cast in the lead roles of Irene and Clare — another sticking point in a moment when white actors still command the most star power and box-office revenue. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga signed on early and stayed attached through the years it took to gather the financing for the film, an unusual vote of confidence that Hall credits with the film’s eventually being made.
The problem with casting obviously black women in roles where they are supposed to be able to pass as white is that the movie makes no sense:
Who could director Rebecca Hall have cast in Passing who could, you know, pass? How about Rashida Jones, the daughter of Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton?
How about, for that matter, Rebecca Hall?
But would making Passing with actresses who actually could pass be more trouble than it was worth? Much of the current out-swelling of racist hatred for whites is due to black women worrying that, despite their high self-esteem, they aren’t objectively as pretty as white women, so casting two pretty actresses who look white is just asking for trouble. Hence:
Other responses pointed to the ways that racial categories continue to shape our collective thinking. When the trailer for the film debuted on social media, it prompted a deluge of tweets. Some shared memes featuring the movie title alongside photos of multiracial celebrities like Rashida Jones, Maya Rudolph and Thandiwe Newton — the implication being that these lighter-skinned actresses would be a better fit for the roles or that they were continuing to benefit from the ability to pass as white in Hollywood and beyond. That so much of the discussion circulated around Thompson’s and Negga’s ability to successfully pass as white felt surreal, a return to a type of racial scrutiny that seems antithetical to the project of both the book and its adaptation.
Interestingly, her father Sir Peter Hall, while marrying Gigi’s Leslie Caron among many others and feuding with Sir Laurence Olivier, saw himself as passing as “phony member of the middle-class.” Sir Peter’s father was a station master, which evidently is not an august profession in Britain. But as a lad he got free railway tickets to London to watch Larry and Ralph Richardson.
I definitely doubt that Sir Peter, an extreme example of a man of the world, failed to notice that his third wife was kinda black.
Then the NYT reporter digresses to explain that she’s multiracial too—half German, half Chinese, and how that was very fraught in high school and she has to tell us all about it.
I would guess that being a half white, half Asian female in modern America is going through the game of life on easy mode, but that’s not what high school seemed like to her (or to anybody).
Anyway, the story of Hall’s maternal line is interesting. Her grandfather’s parents were both listed in the Census as mulatto, as he was in 1910. But in the 1920 Census, he had listed himself as a “Native American Indian.” He married a Dutch woman.
When I asked if her mother ever told stories about her own father that might shed light on why he chose to pass, or what his experience was like afterward, she told me that her grandfather was an artist and a musician, and this is part of what made them close — her mother learned to sing from imitating records in the basement of the family house. She left home soon after he died when she was 16, Hall said, gaining admission to the Cleveland Institute of Music against the odds and later moving to the Barbizon Hotel in New York, and eventually to Europe, where she sang in Salzburg, in Milan, in London.
It sounds like her maternal grandfather was a Europhile, and that Maria was his throwback baby who couldn’t pass for non-black. But her grandfather loved his artistic daughter and her mother loved her father and admired him for setting her on a path that led to her marrying the head of the National Theater of the United Kingdom and having a beautiful and cultured daughter.
