{"id":2023,"date":"2010-05-05T15:00:51","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T15:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2023"},"modified":"2010-05-05T15:00:51","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T15:00:51","slug":"james-sampson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/performers-directors\/black-actors-in-italy\/james-sampson\/","title":{"rendered":"James Sampson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"James
James Sampson in Stagfright<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

aka James E.R. Sampson | James Edward Sampson<\/p>\n

James Sampson was a familiar face in Italian exploitation films of the 1980s.\u00a0 He never had big roles, being more the kind of actor who would pop up for thirty seconds before dropping out of the picture, but some of them were important: as Willy, for instance, in the succesful Stagefright<\/strong>, or the voodoo priest in Claudio Fragasso’s dismal After Death (Oltre la morte)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

According to the imdb, he kicked off his career in Joe D’Amato’s La via della prostituzione<\/strong>, an erotic crime film from 1978.\u00a0 He was relatively busy until the beginning of the 90s, when he disappeared from view at about the same time as much of the Italian cinema industry lost any kind of international focus whatsoever.\u00a0 In 2003, however, he also seems to have re-appeared in Ricky Tognazzi’s Il papa buono<\/strong>, so he must have been lying low over the intervening decade.<\/p>\n

Other biographical information is sketchy.\u00a0 IMDB also has him listed as a singer \/ songwriter, and the fact that he was from the music industry is possibly given some credence by the fact that he played a ‘street musician’ in 2019 – Dopo la caduta di New York<\/strong> and a saxaphone player in Norman Jewison’s Only you<\/strong> (94).\u00a0 There is a James Sampson who’s a soul singer (big in Denmark, apparently), but this looks to be a different, younger man.<\/p>\n