Edmund J. Cambridge, 80; Veteran of Theater Started Troupe, Acting School

Edmund J. Cambridge, an actor and director who was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City in the late 1960s and co-founder of an acting school in Hollywood that has trained hundreds of at-risk students over the last 30 years, has died. He was 80.

Cambridge, a longtime Los Angeles resident, died in New York on Aug. 18 of complications from a fall he suffered while visiting relatives in Harlem.

In a career that spanned more than 60 years, Cambridge moved easily among stage, film and television.

Best known as a stage director, he received an Obie nomination for his direction of the original 1969 Negro Ensemble Company production of Lonne Elder III’s “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” at St. Mark’s Playhouse in New York.

Cambridge directed subsequent productions of Elder’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play at the Pocket Theater in New York and at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. In 1988, he played the lead role of the family patriarch, Harlem barber Russell Parker, in a revival of the play at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills.

In 1984, Cambridge directed the original production of Christine Houston’s play “227” at Marla Gibbs’ Crossroads Theater in Los Angeles and later directed a number of episodes of the NBC sitcom that grew out of the family comedy, which was set in Chicago.

“He was a brilliant director and it was actually due to his interpretation that brought the play to the attention of NBC,” said actress Lynn Hamilton, who alternated with Gibbs in the lead role of the play and won a National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People Image Award for her performance under Cambridge’s direction.

Among Cambridge’s many TV acting credits were guest appearances on “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son,” “ER,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Family Matters” and the miniseries “The Atlanta Child Murders.” On film, he appeared in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey,” “Deep Cover” and “Cool Breeze.”

But Cambridge did film and TV only to pay the bills, said Lincoln Kilpatrick, co-founder of the Kilpatrick-Cambridge Theater Arts School.

“He was,” Kilpatrick said, “a dedicated man of the theater.”

Born in Harlem in 1920, Cambridge began his career on the sly: While still in high school, the 15-year-old Cambridge landed a job as a chorus boy at Harlem’s historic Swan’s Paradise.

Fearful that his family would discover what he was up to, he’d tell his mother that he was doing his homework with friends. Then he’d rush to Swan’s, get into makeup and perform in the 8 p.m. show, rush home and slip into bed. After his family was asleep, he’d slip out again to perform at the midnight show.

His mother caught on and ended his moonlighting as a chorus boy.

“We were both raised with strict parents,” recalled actress Isabel Sanford, who met Cambridge when they were teenagers studying acting at the Harlem YMCA. Cambridge became a director of the YMCA productions and, Sanford said, “I was in every one that I could be.”

And throughout Cambridge’s life, she said, “If you asked him to do anything in show business and didn’t have any money to offer him, he did it anyway. It wasn’t the money he was after. He really loved the business.”

In addition to acting, Cambridge worked as a stage manager off-Broadway in the late 1950s and early ‘60s before moving into directing.

In 1968, he joined Douglas Turner Ward, Robert Hooks, Denise Nicholas and other actors in founding the Negro Ensemble Company.

Cambridge began teaching acting after moving to Los Angeles and co-founding the Kilpatrick-Cambridge Theater Arts School in 1971.

In 1975, Cambridge founded and served as artistic director of the Cambridge Players, an acting troupe that included Esther Rolle, Helen Martin, Juanita Moore, Royce Wallace and Lynn Hamilton. Under Cambridge’s direction, they did about a dozen plays over a six-year span at the Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church.

Cambridge also directed many productions for the Los Angeles Theater Center. For the last decade, he taught acting to senior citizens at the Oasis Center.

Cambridge was a member of Della Reese’s Understanding Principles for Better Living Church, and Reese will conduct the eulogy at a memorial for Cambridge at 8 tonight in the Tom Bradley Theater at the Los Angeles Theater Center, 514 Spring St., Los Angeles.

Cambridge is survived by two brothers, William Cambridge and William Lee, and a sister, Jane Harewood.