Ken Renard – Trinidad and Tobago’s most successful actor

Ray Funk

Although almost unknown in his homeland, actor Ken Renard (1907-1993) had a groundbreaking career that lasted decades. He moved from theatre in Harlem to Broadway to radio, films and television – he appeared in almost 20 feature films and dozens of well-known television shows.

“Ken Renard” was the stage name he used throughout his career, but he was born Kenneth Renwick in Port of Spain in 1907, according to his US immigration record dated May 14, 1923.

Renard appeared in films and television with many of the world’s most famous actors: Sidney Poitier, Jane Fonda, Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford and Robert Redford.

His television appearances read like a list of all the important shows of the 1960s and 70s, including Bonanza, Perry Mason, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible, The Outer Limits, Daniel Boone, The Virginian – and with Boris Karloff (best known for portraying Frankenstein’s monster) in an episode of Thriller.

No other actor born in Trinidad had such a long, varied and high-profile film and television acting career. Renard is not known ever to have returned to TT, but it still seems astonishing he has sunk into such obscurity both at home and away.

His US naturalisation affidavit says Renard arrived there in 1923, moved to Harlem and initially worked in retreading tyres. There’s nothing to suggest he had done any acting in Trinidad, or how he got involved in theatre once he arrived in the US.

But an early resume listed him with the Harlem Players, appearing in 1935 (the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance) in two well-known plays, Sailor Beware and The Front Page, at the Lafayette Theatre.

After this start, he seemed to have joined the most famous black theatre company in Harlem at the time, the Federal Theatre Project, which created work for artists during the Great Depression. Renard performed in four of its productions. He is noted in 1937 in a courtroom melodrama, The Trial of Dr Beck, in the title role. He also appeared in the company’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion.

He also featured in the most lauded plays performed in Harlem in the 30s. One was the Federal Theatre Project’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1936, set in Haiti, retitled Voodoo Macbeth and directed by Orson Welles, of Hollywood fame as an actor, director and writer. Renard played one of the hired assassins.

He was cast to star in the first of a series of the Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper. Titled Ethiopia, it brought to life on the stage Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and Renard was to have played the key role of Emperor Haile Selassie. However, the federal government, fearing a backlash from the Italian government, stopped the play after only a rehearsal.

But it was these Federal Theatre productions that appear to have given Renard’s career an incredible boost. He was soon appearing in plays on Broadway, from the late 1930s into the 1950s, and was a member of various touring companies. This was unusual, since not many black actors were given this opportunity at the time.

One of his most distinctive Broadway roles was in The Reluctant Prostitute, by French existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, in which a woman is threatened to coerce her into wrongfully accusing a black man – played by Renard – of murder.

During this period, Renard also became involved in both radio productions and film. Henry Sampson, in his book Blacks in Black and White, noted Renard acted extensively in radio productions: “He played black and non-black character parts in many radio shows. During this period, he worked for CBS, NBC, and several independent radio stations, including WNEW and WOR in New York City.”

Among these was a production of an adaptation of the novel Green Mansions. His early films included black-cast musicals, Murder with Music (1948) and Killer Diller (1948).

His big Hollywood break came in 1952, in a small role as Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, in a film called Lydia Bailey. Based on a popular novel of the time in which a romance is set against the backdrop of the revolution, Renard portrays Louverture with dignity and intellect.

Soon he was getting more calls for major film productions. A few years later, he moved to the Los Angeles area, where he lived for the rest of his life, appearing regularly in both films and television – and soon he started getting very diverse roles.

In 1957, he starred as an African tribal leader on trial in Something of Value; his son in the movie was Sidney Poitier.

In a brief interview with The New Pittsburgh Courier in 1960, Renard noted the difficulties black actors faced at the time.

“Unfortunately, they generally do not give Negros anything but parts as Negros. However, as far as I’m concerned, I could play the part of a Latin or an Indian.”

Indeed, as his career progressed, he was given a wide variety of such roles. In a later resume, he noted that he “

From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, Renard was incredibly busy. By the 1970s he had played roles from servants to the leader of an African country, in the Robert Wagner series It Takes a Thief. In a number of westerns, he plays everything from ranch hands to Indian chiefs. He appeared as a trial judge in an episode of Perry Mason and in two episodes of the detective show Police Woman, which starred Angie Dickinson.

No doubt he would have had many stories to tell if he had been interviewed further about his long career.

His last performances were in the early 1980s, and he appears to have lived a quiet life in retirement thereafter.

A collection of photos, a funeral bulletin, theatre programmes and more are in a collection at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, which is the only repository of material on his career.

The headstone on Ken Renard’s Los Angeles grave summarises his life in one word: “ACTOR.”