Eye Tunes with Lucky Singh

Bonnie Greer left Chicago's South Side wanting to be a lawyer, until a professor told her outright that he didn't think women belonged in law. She switched to theatre instead, studied under David Mamet in Chicago and Elia Kazan at New York's Actors Studio, and by the late 1970s was living in Manhattan's West Village. Then AIDS started taking her friends, one after another, and by 1986 she'd had enough. A production brought her to the Edinburgh Festival that year. She stayed in Britain for good, telling the Sunday Times two decades later that the move had saved her life — she needed, in her words, to "escape the shadow of death."

That's the Bonnie Greer most obituaries will lead with: American, Black, an outsider who came to Britain running from something. What's stranger, and more interesting, is what she became once she got here.