Terrence Howard pimps up his career

Terrence Howard in Hustle and Flow

If Terrence Dashon Howard is expected to be the latest standard-bearer for mainstream black actors - following the Jamie Foxx show last year, the mega-stardom of Denzel Washington and Will Smith, and a lineage stretching back to Sidney Poitier - he's wearing it lightly.

Munching eggs benedict in a London hotel suite, the Oscar nominee bridles momentarily when coffee arrives: "What, no cream?" he questions. "I thought you wanted it black," his disgruntled publicist replies. "Then I decided I was going to integrate my coffee," he jokes.

Just lately, the 36-year-old has been carving out a niche in a certain kind of film. He was Ray Charles' guitar-playing cohort, Gossie McKee, in Ray. He is in the Barbershop-like The Salon, and next year he will be in films with 50 Cent and OutKast.

But labels are starting to seem superfluous with Howard. This year's key Howard films are the annoyingly hand-wringing state-of-LA opus Crash, in which he is superb as a moneyed TV executive whose wife is molested by a racist cop, and now Hustle & Flow, an earnest, showy character piece about the frustrated aspirations of a Memphis pimp.

Howard was nervous when he tiptoed around playing DJay, who is bursting to break into hip-hop and escape the slums.

"I was afraid that instead of trying to kill a stereotype, they were trying to propagate a stereotype," explains Howard, suave in a black suit and shirt. "Blaxploitation, glorification of pimps, glorification of the gangsta life. I didn't want to participate in anything like that."

While Hustle & Flow doesn't go down that route, it doesn't break free of overly honed, slightly obvious drama - it is from the MTV stable.

That the film succeeds in dishing out a hefty Rocky-like slug is because of Howard's total commitment: there are scenes, like the one in which he is desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the local rap star Skinny Black (played by Ludacris, Howard's co-star in Crash) where emotion is practically hanging off his face.

This isn't surprising when you find out the lengths Howard went to. He interviewed 123 pimps and 78 prostitutes over two-and-a-half years, and lived with four separate pimps for various periods, including two weeks with Tweety Bird, a friend of his uncle, and another month-long stint in a Memphis bordello.

He was cut up by what he saw. "They were struggling with nothing left to sell but their humanity and, y'know, I couldn't judge them any more. I judged me. I judged the lack of the infrastructure that was supposed to protect them. I judged the government that disenfranchised them from the American Dream."

Howard says director Craig Brewer selected him because, unlike certain other rappers and actors who read for the role, he hadn't wanted to do it, and wasn't too keen to pimp it up: he turned the role down twice.

Brewer demanded that Howard give up two-years-plus for the role. The actor had just divorced from his wife so, temporarily separated from his three children, he underwent total immersion for the role.

The rapping sounds like the easy part. Howard pulls it off passionately, even though he doesn't own a single rap album. He is musically adept, though: he was brought up listening to country, plays flamenco guitar, and jams with Quincy Jones.

The film done, Howard and his wife, Lori, remarried. The actor isn't sure if playing DJay unpicked whatever emotional knots on his side had caused them to split. "I don't know. I know that when she came to the premiere at Sundance, I think for the first time she was proud of me.

"She might have seen some of the pain and anguish I'd been talking to her about, trying to get her back. She saw a lot of that in the character, I think."

Turning pimp for two years smacks of ascetic De Niro-esque privation, and there is little doubt Howard is the archetypal driven character-actor - hence the constant expansive, conflicted performances that transcend whatever labels are slapped on them.

He had the archetypal itinerant actor's upbringing, too: he shuttled between his mother in Cleveland and his father in Los Angeles, the light-skinned child of mixed-race parents. His father served a year in prison for manslaughter when Howard was 3, for a nationally reported "Santa Line Slaying".

Tyrone Howard had taken his children to a Christmas grotto, when he got into an argument that led to the stabbing-to-death of Jack Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick's family has disputed Howard's account of the incident, as recounted on Oprah, saying the dead man was 1.7m, not the "huge" 1.95m the future actor remembered.

The incident contains the kind of unpredictable eddies and contradictions Howard is able to summon in front of a camera. When elaborating on the advice his great-grandmother, actress and singer Minnie Gentry, gave him, he spools out a gnomic formula: "The truth is truly relative. Opinions are subjective. The truth is universally relative. That's what I use in every aspect of my life, but particularly in finding characters and portraying them."

He stares fixedly with his green eyes and feline face, friendly but somehow distant and searching. There is no doubt that, now, added to his simmering cauldron is ambition. Recognition as an actor is on his mind, evidently, and Hustle & Flow, crudely affective though it is, isn't quite there.

Idlewild, the forthcoming OutKast musical, sounds more promising, but he has a supporting part. Someone, please, write this man the role he deserves.


LOWDOWN


WHO: Terrence Howard, Oscar nominee for Hustle & Flow, and cast member of best picture nominee Crash
BORN: March 11 1969, Chicago
KEY ROLES: Dead Presidents (1995), The Players Club (1998), Big Momma's House (2000), Hart's War (2002), Ray (2004), Crash (2005), Four Brothers (2005), Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2005)
LATEST: Hustle & Flow opens March 2


- INDEPENDENT