Perseverance Finally Pays Off [Source: Wave Newspaper Group,
Milton McGriff, Staff Writer:]
When Henry Gayle Sanders first became an actor, it was a struggle to get his friends to come out and see him. "Sometimes I was bad, sometimes the play was bad, sometimes we both were bad," Sanders said, laughing at the memory. Those days are long gone and Sanders' friends -- and millions of others -- now watch him weekly as he portrays Robert E., an independent village blacksmith in the CBS TV series, "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." In an episode airing at 8 p.m. on March 26, the series focuses on Robert E. and his wife Grace played by Jonelle Allen, when they outbid other townspeople and purchase a home at an auction in Colorado Springs, Colo., where the series is set.The purchase leads to a confrontation with the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and a crisis of conscience for the town. "He's a businessman but when called upon, he steps up," Sanders said of Robert E., a man who refuses to use the last name he acquired from his former slave master. "Quinn," now in its second season, has been picked up for the fall, said Sanders during an interview at the office of his publicist.
Perserverance and hard work are paying off for the Houston-born actor, who had no idea what he wanted to with his life until he was nearing the big three-o. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that acting saved my life," he said. "Or, at the very least it gave me an entirely new one." In a career spanning two dozen years, Sanders has worked on stage and film with regularity. His cinematic breakthrough came when then-UCLA graduate student Bobby Roth cast him in his thesis film, "Independence Day."
One of Sanders' favorite stage roles was that of Rev. Martin Luther King in Jeff Stetson's "The Meeting," about a fictional meeting between King and Malcolm X a week before Malcolm's assassination in 1965. To prepare for the role, Sanders said he gained 25 pounds and studied videotapes and Coretta Scott King's book about the civil rights leader. "I didn't want to imitate him, I wanted to find his passion," he said. Another incentive that drove him: King's daughter came to see him do the role.
Now 51, Sanders was born in 1942 and described himself as an overweight and rebellious teenager. "I was fat and I had to fight a lot," he said. "I tried to bring rebelliousness home, but my Mom wasn't going to hear it." She got him to slim down after wining a three-month membership to a health club, then enrolled him in Louisiana Catholic boarding school.
A month after turning 18, Sanders joined the Army. "I knew the Army would take me somewhere, I didn't know where, " he said. It took him to Germany in 1961 right after the now-demolished Berlin Wall was erected and it later took him through two tours in Vietnam. Sanders admits that he stayed in the Army because he still had no sense of direction. However, he started writing a partly autobiographical novel out of boredom when the Army hospitalized him for 30 days "for drinking and smoking too much." Four years and 200 pages later, he was looking for a publisher and the quest eventually brought him to Los Angeles.
Writing the novel was good therapy," Sanders said. "It showed me I was interested in writing." He took courses at Los Angeles City College, Valley College and UCLA. While enrolled the latter, Sanders met Beth Sullivan, who has been a friend for 20 years and who is the creator and executive producer of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."
At UCLA, a friend gave him a clipping that introduced him to an acting workshop. "It was good for me because I had a lot of emotional blocks," Sanders said. "I was real inhibited." After studying for about 18 months, he remembers talking with someone from a telephone booth on a Hollywood street corner. "I was talking to a lady when I started crying for the first time in 10 years, he said.
Sanders has essayed several roles since those days when his friends stopped coming to see him, in parts as varied as the convict El Raheem in Miguel Pinero's "Short Eye" and the chauffeur Hoke in "Driving Miss Daisy." His favorite film role was in another Roth film, "The Boss' Son," in which he plays a perpetually broke truck driver with an important dream of becoming a salesman. Since meeting Roth at UCLA Sanders has worked with him about a dozen times in theatrical and television movies.
He's still writing and eventually wants to direct. "I have a production company and every few years I try to find the money to get a film made." Living with his second wife, Naila, and their two children, daughter, Azizi, 11, and son, Naeem, 9, in Altadena, Sanders recently became a grandfather by the daughter from his first marriage. Although he remembers his career is moving well, he said he remembers a saying that keeps things in perspective for him. "Nobody invited me into this business," he said. "And no one will miss me when I'm gone."