Bonnie Greer obituary — SkimNews
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- Bonnie Greer has died aged 77, according to an obituary tracing a broadcasting and writing career built around BBC2's Late Review and Newsnight Review from the 1990s onward
- Born in Chicago as one of seven children of a sharecropper-turned-factory-hand who served as a teenage D-day GI stationed in England, Greer became a British citizen in 1997 and was appointed OBE in 2010, dedicating the honour to her father
- After nursing a friend through AIDS in 1980s Manhattan, Greer moved to London in 1986 and married solicitor-turned-teacher David Hutchins in 1993; he survives her as her amanuensis, chauffeur and writing encourager
- Her most successful play, Marilyn and Ella (2008), dramatised an imagined encounter between Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe as a study of black and white culture, while her 2009 novel Entropy was a source of particular pride
- In 2009 Greer appeared as a panellist on BBC One's Question Time alongside British National Party leader Nick Griffin, deliberately withholding her charm without losing her temper; a later appearance opposing Brexit reportedly earned her the freedom of numerous Irish villages
- She served as deputy chair of the British Museum (2005-13), chancellor of Kingston University from 2013, and on the boards of the Serpentine Gallery, Royal Opera House and London Film School, before resigning as president of the Brontë Society in 2015 after an ill-tempered public meeting
Why it matters: Greer was one of very few people of colour on British arts broadcasting in the 1990s, and the obituary notes she received fan mail from young Black women who had never before seen someone who resembled them given such television prominence, while racist hate mail arrived in nearly equal measure. Her death closes a chapter in which Black critical voices on mainstream British culture were rare enough to be remarkable.
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