Watching one of my favourite actors, Jeffrey Wright, in the recent American Fiction reminded of the first time I saw him in the miniseries Angels in America, developed from Tony Kushner’s 1991 play set in 1985 during the New York Aids epidemic.
In the miniseries, Directed by Mike Nichols, Al Pacino played the real life Right Wing Jewish NY lawyer Roy Cohn, who had claimed he had manoeuvred the death penalty for the Jewish American spies Ethel Rosenberg and her husband Julius at their 1951 trial. Cohn also worked for Senator McCarthy in the anti-Communist Un-American Trials. As it happens, Cohn also represented Donald Trump in his early business career – along with the Mafia bosses Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante and John Gotti.
But in the final Act of the miniseries, Cohn, a closet homosexual and virulent homophobe, is in hospital dying of Aids, attended by Belize, a gay black drag artist and male nurse played by Jeffrey Wright. As Cohn dies the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep) visits him, wondering if she will forgive him - but she decides instead to share the fact that he has been disbarred from practicing as a lawyer, and relish his misery.
When Cohn dies Belize asks Louis, a Gay Jew, to sing the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.
“I’m not saying the Kaddish for him.” says Louis, ‘No fucking way am I praying for him. I can’t believe you’d actually pray for him.”
Belize says “He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe a queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy. It doesn’t count if it’s easy. I’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Maybe that’s where love and justice finally meet. Peace, a least, isn’t that what the Kaddish asks for?
Reluctantly, Louis, a secular Jew who says he hardly knows the words of the prayer, begins. As he faulters the ghost of Ethel reappears, prompting him. At the end she says, and Louis repeats “You son of a bitch”.
The miniseries, which also starred Emma Thompson and Mary-Louise Parker is still available on an HBO video. it is over 5 hours long, but full of invention - and for me it was worth it for Jeffrey Wright's performance. Very far from the late Bond character Felix Leiter.
