Bonnie Greer obituary — SkimNews
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- Bonnie Greer, the writer and broadcaster, has died aged 77 after a career spanning drama, fiction, biography, memoir and documentary
- Born in Chicago to Ben Greer — a teenage GI in the D-day landing forces and former Mississippi sharecropper — she moved to London in 1986, became a British citizen in 1997, and received an OBE in 2010
- She became a fixture of BBC2's Late Review and Newsnight Review from the 1990s, where her warm laugh and sharp, generous brain won a loyal fanbase — alongside openly racist hate mail that arrived weekly at Television Centre
- Her 2008 play Marilyn and Ella dramatised an encounter between Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe; her 2014 memoir was titled A Parallel Life and her 2009 experimental novel Entropy was a source of particular pride
- In 2009 she appeared on BBC One's Question Time alongside BNP leader Nick Griffin, and was later offered the freedom of numerous Irish villages after a Brexit-opposing appearance on the same programme
- She served as deputy chair of the British Museum (2005–13), chancellor of Kingston University from 2013, and resigned as Brontë Society president in 2015 exhausted by internal squabbling — famously using the heel of a Jimmy Choo shoe as an impromptu gavel
- She married David Hutchins in 1993 and is survived by him
Why it matters: Greer held a singular position bridging American and British cultural life and was one of the very few Black women with regular television prominence on British arts broadcasting in the 1990s. Her 2009 Question Time clash with Nick Griffin — and the racist correspondence she received simply for appearing — captured in miniature the racial politics she navigated throughout her career.
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