William (Bill) Harrison Gunn, playwright, actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, and novelist, became one of the most respected, admired, and versatile artists, who broke new ground in the area of black independent film in the twentieth century. Born on July 15, 1934, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Gunn grew up in a middle-class environment with creative parents, and attended integrated public schools. His father, William Harrison, also known as Bill Gunn, was a songwriter, musician, comedian, and unpublished poet. Gunn's mother, Louise Alexander Gunn, was an actress and a beauty contest winner, who ran her own theater group, where Gunn got an early taste for drama. He served a short time in the U.S. Navy and then moved to the East Village in New York, to become an actor in the 1950s. Although he struggled to survive financially, his acting career eventually earned him enough money to allow him to study art, to buy an historic house in New York State, and to write.

Gunn's career in the performing arts began in the 1950s. His stage acting credits include Carson McCullers's Member of the Wedding (1950), The Immoralist, with James Dean (1954), and Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step, which won him critical acclaim for his major role as the young boy in the 1954 production. For the next few years, Gunn continued to act in such plays as Sign of Winter (1958), Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1962), Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale, both produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (1963).

During the early 1960s, Gunn regularly had minor or secondary roles in many of the popular television series and films. He appeared in American Parade, Danger, The Fugitive, Dr. Kildare, The Interns, Outer Limits, Route 66, Stoney Burke, Tarzan, and The Cosby Show. Gunn expanded his acting role to such films as The Sound and the Fury (1959), The Interns (1962), The Spy with My Face (1966), and Losing Ground, an independent film by Gunn's close friend Kathleen Collins Prettyman, in which he starred and collaborated on with his friend actor/director Duane Jones in 1982.

After Gunn saved enough money as a Broadway and Off-Broadway performer, he began a parallel career as a playwright and a writer. He introduced his first stage play, Marcus in the High Grass in 1958, with the Theatre Guild at the Westport Theatre in Connecticut, followed by his 1968 one-act play, Johnnas, and Black Picture Show (1975), and Rhinestone Sharecropping (1982), both musical plays adapted from his novels by the same titles. In 1985, Family Employment was produced at the Public Theatre with Gunn in the leading role, and the New York Shakespeare Festival produced The Forbidden City one day after Gunn's death in 1989.

In 1964, since many of the roles that Gunn played proved to be unsatisfying or not stimulating enough, he launched his literary career as a writer with his first novel, a bildungsroman, All the Rest Have Died. He published his next novel, Black Picture Show in 1975, followed by Rhinestone Sharecropping (1981), and The Forbidden City (1987). Like his stage plays and several screenplays, Gunn's novels are semi-autobiographical and address such issues as racial identity and the broader themes of personal development and self-discovery, especially of the artist in conflict with society.

From the late 1960s up until his death, Gunn also wrote for movies and television and acted in several of his screenplays. Fame Game, and Friends, were both produced in 1968, and Stop in 1969, which was never released by Warner Brothers. His next three screenplays, Angel Levine, based on Bernard Malamud's story "The Angel Levine," Don't the Moon Look Lonesome, adapted from Don Asher's novel, and The Landlord, based on Kristin Hunter's novel, were all released in 1970. Gunn's screen biography, Bessie, was adapted from Chris Albertson's novel in 1972. Ganja and Hess, originally titled The Vampires of Harlem, was re-edited as Blood Couple, 1973, which Gunn directed and appeared in as George Meda, the assistant to Green (played by Duane Jones). Three years later it was followed by The Greatest, The Muhammad Ali Story, and Men of Bronze (1988). Gunn's commercial and educational television credits include Johnnas (1972) and The Alberta Hunter Story, a teleplay (1982).

In the 1970s, Gunn's contributions received considerable recognition. His second play, Johnnas, won the 1972 Emmy Award for the best television play. His Ganja and Hess, called "the most complicated, intriguing, subtle, sophisticated, and passionate black film of the Seventies," was selected as one of the ten Best American Films of the Decade at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 1973. Ganja and Hess was shown at the Mexican Film Festival, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, before it later became part of a collection at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1975, Gunn received two AUDELCO Black Theatre Recognition Awards for Best Playwright and Best Play of the Year for Black Picture Show, and a 1980 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award in Filmmaking. Johnnas appeared in the special 1968 issue on black theatre in Drama Review, under the heading "Theatre of the Black Experience." A special issue of Black Film Review was dedicated to Gunn in the spring of 1989, in which film historians Pearl Bowser and John Williams both acknowledged his numerous achievements. In 1991, Phyllis Klotman co-dedicated Screenplays of the African American Experience to Gunn and to his friend Kathleen Collins Prettyman. He has also received notable mention in Black Film Review, Essence, Nation, Newsweek, New Yorker, New York Magazine, Philadelphia Bulletin, Time, and Variety. On April 5, 1989, one day before his play The Forbidden City opened at the Public Theater, Gunn died of encephalitis in Nyack Hospital in New York.

--Loretta Woodard, Marygrove College