Happy Birthday, Lloyd Richards

(June 29th, 1919 - June 29th 2006) Film and Video Director, Lloyd Richards was born this date in 1919.

*Update: Richards made the transition on his birthday, June 29th, 2006 of a heart ailment at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
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From Toronto, Canada, at an early age his family moved to Detroit, Michigan. Lloyd Richards was only nine years old when his father died, leaving his mother to raise five children during the Depression. To make matters worse soon after his mother became blind. At 13, young Lloyd went to work to help support the struggling family. Richards entered Wayne University in Detroit but had to enlist to fight in World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943 and '44. On returning to school, Richards pursued drama, learning all aspects of theater and radio production.

After graduation he started a theater group in Detroit with a handful of friends and classmates. Richards moved to New York city in 1947 to pursue an acting career and worked on Broadway in Freight and The Egghead and on radio throughout the 1950s. He also taught acting and directed off-Broadway. In 1958, Richards impressed Broadway with his production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. This production began a new era in the representation of African-Americans on the American stage. In the 1960s, Richards directed the Broadway productions The Long Dream, The Moon Besieged, I Had a Ball and The Yearling.

In 1966, Richards became head of the actor training program at New York University's School of the Arts. He was also Professor of Theater and Cinema at Hunter College in New York City before he was tapped to become dean of the Yale University School of Drama in 1979, and Artistic Director of the Yale Repertory Theater. Richards has discovered and developed new plays and playwrights, as Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Center, as a member of the Playwrights' selection committee of the Rockefeller Foundation and with the New American Plays program of the Ford Foundation.

In 1984, his search for a major new American playwright was fulfilled with the production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson, and the successive installments of Wilson's multi-part chronicle of African-American life. These plays include Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running and Seven Guitars. Richards' productions for television include segments of Roots: The Next Generation, Bill Moyers' Journal and Robeson, a presentation on the life of the African-American actor and activist Paul Robeson. He also dealt with Robeson's life and legacy in the 1977 theatrical production Paul Robeson.

Richards has received the Pioneer Award of AUDELCO, the Frederick Douglass Award and, in 1993, was the National Medal of the Arts. He has also served as President of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Retired since 1991, from the Yale University School of Drama Yale Rep he remains Professor Emeritus at Yale University, and continues to teach, direct, and search for new plays and playwrights.