Basil Wallace

Basil Wallace, a Jamaican-American actor, also works as a playwright, theater director and acting teacher. Born in Kingston and brought to the United States as a child, he grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island before studying at New York University, where he appeared in his first Off-Off-Broadway play. He built a long career in New York theater, notably with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, acting in a 1972 production of Ed Bullins one-acts. He co-wrote and directed Sounds of a Silent Man for La MaMa in 1973 and directed Edgar Nkosi White's Lament for Rastafari there in 1977, returning in 1987 for a reading of White's Tres Cepas. He also taught at Lincoln Center Theater and helped found the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre. After moving to Los Angeles in 1990, he was cast as the villain Screwface in Marked for Death (1990) and kept acting in film and television through the 1990s and 2000s.