Trevor Rhone, a leading Caribbean playwright and screenwriter who co-wrote the 1972 film “The Harder They Come,” which helped introduce reggae music and urban Jamaican culture to international audiences, died Tuesday in a hospital in Kingston, Jamaica. Rhone, 69, had a heart attack.
“The Harder They Come” starred reggae performer Jimmy Cliff as an aspiring singer who becomes a hero to the poor after killing a police officer. The film, co-written with director Perry Henzell, was drawn from the story of a Jamaican criminal killed by police in 1948.
For many American audience members, the film was their first view of urban Jamaican life and culture. It featured music by Cliff, who sings the title song, and other songs by Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker and others. It remained an art-house staple in the United States for several years after its initial release. It also broke Jamaica’s box-office records but did not enrich Rhone.
“It made money for somebody, I would imagine,” he told the New York Times. “Not me.”
Rhone’s plays often used satire to comment on the social conflicts in Jamaica after its independence from England in 1962.
A farmer’s son, Trevor Dave Rhone was born March 24, 1940, in Kingston and grew up in a rural village, Bellas Gate, which would later inspire his autobiographical play “Bellas Gate Boy.” In 1959, he left for England to attend drama school and returned to Jamaica in the late 1960s when he grew frustrated with the low-quality parts offered to black actors.
“My first acting jobs in the professional theater saw me perpetuating negative and stereotyped images of blacks,” he told the reference guide Contemporary Authors. “My first effort at writing a play was an attempt to find something worthwhile to perform.”
