Carmen Munroe is one of Britain’s leading Black actresses. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana), she went to Britain in 1951 and gained early acting experience with the West Indian Students’ Drama Group. Munroe made her professional stage debut in 1962 and later played major roles in London’s West End theater, including Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1970). When she played Orinthia, the king’s mistress, in George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (1970), she said it was the first time she had been cast in a leading role not written for a Black actress. Since the 1970s, Munroe has played an important part in the development of Black theater in Britain, scoring a personal triumph in 1987 as the overzealous pastor of a Harlem “storefront” church in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner. In 1993, she won a best actress award from Time Out magazine for Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind.

In 1965 Munroe made an early television appearance in Fable. In this controversial British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) drama, writer John Hopkins reversed apartheid and located it in Britain so that Black people ran the country and whites were subjected to en forced population-movement and pass laws. However, this innovative and highly charged play did not have the reception anticipated from audiences. Viewers were put off, while critics thought the play heavy-handed and moralistic.

In 1967 Munroe was featured in an episode of Rainbow City, one of the first British television series to include a Black actor in a leading role. Since that time, she has demonstrated her acting range in numerous other appearances, with roles in a mixture of populist dramas and situation comedies, as well as impressive single dramas. They include Doctor Who (1967), In the Beautiful Caribbean (1972), Ted (1972), Shakespeare’s Country (1973), General Hospital (1974), The Fosters (1976), A Black Christmas (1977) with Norman Beaton, Mixed Blessings (1978), A Hole in Babylon (1979), Rumpole of the Bailey (1983), and The Hope and the Glory (1984).

In 1989 Munroe was in Desmond’s, one of Channel 4’s most successful situation comedy programs. Costarring Norman Beaton as the proprietor of a barbershop in south London, Desmond’s has been one of the few British television series to feature an almost entirely Black cast. For five years, this appealing series won critical acclaim and awards for its humorous exploration of the conflict between the views of young British-born Blacks and the values of the older generation who grew up in the Caribbean.

In between her appearances in Desmond’s, Munroe took part in Ebony People (1989), sharing her experiences of the acting world with a studio audience, and Black and White in Colour (1992), a documentary tracing the history of Black people in British television. In 1992, Munroe gave an outstanding performance as Essie Robeson in a BBC play called A Song at Twilight. This emotional drama, shown in the anthology series Encounters, explored an imaginary meeting in 1958 between British socialist radical Aneurin Bevan and the Black American singer and militant activist Paul Robeson. Another recent role for Munroe was in the two-part drama The Final Passage (1996), a story of Blacks emigrating from the Caribbean to Britain in the late 1950s.