The mold that Sidney Poitier helped create, and ultimately tried to abandon, has become Danny Glover's inheritance.
Glover, easily the most successful black dramatic actor since Poitier, is cast almost exclusively in roles that require a preternatural nobility, dignity and deferential nature.There might be a few votes cast for Denzel Washington as the guardian of the Poitier mantle, or for chameleonic Morgan Freeman or edgy Laurence Fishburne, but none matches Glover for stainless screen profiles or commercial viability.
A note of resignation creeps into Glover's voice when he discusses the career channel he has found himself in. "Ultimately, it's men, white men, that make the decisions about who's going to be cast in the sexy lead role or the supporting role," he says, "We (black people) are not seen as having the world as our arena. We're not seen as having the intellect or complexity of other people."
Glover, 46, with gray-speckled hair (no sign of a gleaming halo here), was in town to promote his new film, "The Saint of Fort Washington," which centers on the relationship between two homeless men in New York City, and co-stars Matt Dillon.
"The Saint of Fort Washington" again finds Glover, in the role of down-and-out Jerry, as a noble father figure, providing the selfless care that Dillon's emotionally troubled Matthew needs.
A homeless windshield washer/panhandler, Jerry takes Matthew, whose last home was recently demolished by the city, under his wing and teaches him how to survive on the streets and in a city-operated shelter.
Throughout his career, Glover's steady characters have been set in contrast to the jagged individualism or emotional volatility of, in most instances, a white hero or heroine.
In "Places in the Heart," Glover's Moze is the plaintive vagabond recruited to aid Sally Field's shrill and feisty Edna Spalding.
In the "Lethal Weapon" cop-buddy movies that have made Glover a household name, his Roger Murtagh plays wet nurse to Mel Gibson's Martin Riggs, a reckless, sexy, angst-riddled junior detective.
A welter of other roles - in "Grand Canyon," "Silverado," the television film "Mandela" and the TV Western miniseries "Lonesome Dove" - have all played a part in custom-fitting the Poitier mold to fit Danny like a Glover.
The actor's success at working within the constraints of his roles, bringing depth to sketchily written characters, has impressed audiences and critics alike. As critic John Leonard wrote of Glover: "I'm grateful to him for his range, energy and eloquence. It's just that by working so much and so often as someone acquainted with and inhibited by the ambiguities, he tends to get muscled out of his pictures by less complicated and more bullying single-note characters - a nobler Alfre Woodard in `Mandela,' a crazier Gibson in `Lethal Weapon' and so on."
It is a measure of Glover's ability that few of his portrayals have lapsed into caricature; despite his profile in Hollywood as moral spine-for-hire, he has also attempted to broaden his range of types and recast his image.
This was particularly the case in Charles Burnett's mesmerizing "To Sleep With Anger," where Glover brings con man Harry Mention to life, and to a lesser extent in Steven Spielberg's big-budgeted vision of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple," where he delivers a humanized Mister. In both cases, Glover managed briefly to escape the shadow of saintliness that enshrouds him.
"The Saint of Fort Washington" finds Glover back on familiar, cinematically hallowed ground. While acknowledging that he is again cast in the role of savior, Glover says, his screen relationship with Dillon was much more symbiotic than others he had.
"Before Matthew (Dillon's character) came along, Jerry had lost his will to dream," says Glover. "Matthew gave this back to him."
Glover's offscreen persona hasn't done much to discourage his goody-goody image. His political activism and his contributions of time and money to a variety of causes have seemed like an extension of many of the characters he plays.
"Danny has a real social conscience, and it's the real thing. It's not egotistical," Dillon says. "I usually tell people that he's the real saint. When he wasn't working, he was usually visiting some hospital or giving time to some charity."
Still, taking a stand on sometimes controversial topics doesn't strike everyone as angelic. Glover was bitterly criticized in some quarters for his campaign over the last year to prevent the execution of a black man on death row in Texas. When the criticism is mentioned, Glover gets defensive, chopping the air with meaty hands.
"People were acting like I was just down there because I was a celebrity," Glover says. "I'd be doing that anyway even if I wasn't who I was. S---, if I was sweeping floors I'd be doing something."
Glover's activism extends back to the 1960s when he was part of the Black Student Union at San Francisco State University and was acquainted with the Black Panther Party.
Looking back from the perspective of a gender-sensitive family man, Glover now sees that the "idealists" he once ran with were less than ideal.
"You thought it was right to disrespect women the way we did in the BSU. You thought it was all right to have three or four women," he says. "I found myself responding in that way, but I couldn't pull it off. I couldn't convince myself I could do it."
When not on the road or on a film location, Glover is at home with his wife, Asake Bomani, in their three-story Victorian house in the gentrified hills above San Francisco's Haight Street, a few blocks from where Glover grew up. Their teenage daughter, Mandisa, is in college.
Bomani runs a San Francisco art gallery that features African art and sculpture. Glover helps out there as much as he can ("Art," Glover once said, "is confrontational in that it challenges someone's way of thinking"), but he has his hands full trying to cope with an acting career that is freighted with responsibility for how his race is perceived by tens of millions of people. As he has fought to transform negative perceptions of black people, Glover has been frustrated to see a spate of movies in recent years that he says have reinforced images of black social pathologies.