EXIT LINES

Actress Esther Rolle, who has made a name for herself on stage and on television (“Good Times”) says the lot of the black actor has improved little since she started in show business in 1942. “No matter what age I am or what age they require, I generally have to be fat and gray,” said Rolle, 55. “They can’t see an attractive, mature black grandmother. She has to be gray and decrepit, generally. But a white grandmother can be her age.” Rolle, in Winston-Salem, N.C., recently for the National Black Theatre Festival, said the best hope for black actors is the small but growing number of black producers. Whites, she said, just don’t think of casting blacks in mainstream roles.