Earlier than he performed Archie Bunker’s equally outspoken neighbor, George Jefferson, on All within the Household, and earlier than George moved on as much as a dee-luxe house within the sky in The Jeffersons, Sherman Hemsley was a stage actor with a ardour for music. But it surely was Jefferson (and Norman Lear‘s groundbreaking sitcoms) who would flip the intensely personal, Philadelphia born Hemsley into an leisure trailblazer.
Lear was so satisfied that Hemsley was the suitable man to play Jefferson that he waited a full two years for the actor to wrap his theater commitments and report back to the All within the Household set. Lear’s instincts had been appropriate: Hemsley parlayed the present’s writers’ phrases, plus snippets of actual individuals from Hemsley’s personal early years, into a personality that confirmed a Black patriarch character in a brand-new means.