Perry Henzell

Perry Henzell (7 March 1936, Annotto Bay, St. Mary's, Jamaica – 30 November 2006, Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth's, Jamaica) was most famous for being the director of the first Jamaican feature film, The Harder They Come (1972), starring Jimmy Cliff. Henzell, whose ancestors included Huguenot glassblowers and an old English family who had made their fortune growing sugar on Antigua, grew up on the Caymanas sugar cane estate near Kingston. He was sent to a boarding school in the United Kingdom at fourteen and later attended McGill University in Montreal in 1953 and 1954. He then dropped out of this school, choosing instead to hitchhike around Europe. He eventually got work as a stagehand at the BBC. He returned to Jamaica in the 1950s, where he directed advertisements for some years until he began work on The Harder They Come. In 1965 he married Sally Densham. Henzell also shot some footage for what was planned as his next film, No Place Like Home, in Harder's aftermath, but he went...