A Part Colored By History

But others argue that this country is far from ready for the colorblind approach. There remains a real dearth of roles for women of color.

"This is bigger than Mariane Pearl," says Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "Let's say Queen Latifah had optioned a biopic on Princess Diana. Do we believe we'd ever see Queen Latifah playing Princess Diana? Absolutely not."

For her part, Pearl says it's is a non-issue. "This is the story of a group of individuals," she wrote in an e-mail, "and how they chose to behave as opposed to a group of people seen through the prism of race, color or religion.

"I chose Angie for who she is not what she looks like."

As a European, Pearl may well process race differently than an American woman of a similar mixed-race heritage, who historically in this country would have been deemed "black" and therefore subject to the peculiarities of American-style racism.

In the book upon which the film is based, Pearl writes that Daniel lovingly dubbed her "my mulatta." Of her Cuban-born mother, Marita Van Neyenhoff, she writes: "She was colored, and she had a Chinese grandfather. Clearly there was Spanish and African blood in her, and who knew what else. I felt like history had worked really hard for me to enjoy being a bit of everything." (Her father was Dutch.)

Says "A Mighty Heart" director Michael Winterbottom: "To try and find a French actress who's half-Cuban, quarter-Chinese, half-Dutch who speaks great English and could do that part better -- I mean, if there had been some more choices, I might have thought, 'Why don't we use that person?' . . . I don't think there would have been anyone better."

In the film, the only reference to Pearl's heritage is when she tells someone at a dinner party that her mother was Cuban. (Pearl's mother is played by a red-haired, white-skinned actress.)

In her book, Pearl writes about the racism that she, and particularly her brother Satchi, encountered growing up in Paris. Once, she recalls, Satchi came home bloodied by racists who had mistaken him for North African and hit him on the head with a crowbar. When she and Daniel showed up together for interviews in Pakistan, Pakistanis would stare at them.

"Danny was white," she writes, "I looked a bit like them. Nobody asked me about my origins or religion, but I appreciated once more the advantages of our being a mixed couple."

What a missed opportunity to explore -- or at least acknowledge with visual cues -- those complexities within the context of the movie. Daniel Pearl, after all, was murdered for being who he was: a Jewish American of Israeli and Iraqi Jewish descent. Why not, in telling this story, tell all of it? Images are powerful, possessing the potential to smash stereotypes. And reinforce them.

It will be interesting to see the reaction next year when we'll have the mixed-race Berry in "Class Act," playing the role of Tierney Cahill, a white schoolteacher whose sixth-grade class persuaded her to run for Congress in 2000. Still, we're not likely to see chocolate-hued Angela Bassett playing Hillary Rodham Clinton any time soon.

More often than not, we find whites taking on the roles of heroic people of color, and not the other way around. Consider Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," a retelling of how two Port Authority police officers were trapped under the rubble on 9/11 until they were rescued by Marine Sgt. Jason L. Thomas. Thomas is black; in the film, he is played by a white man. ("If you're going to tell a story, you should try to get it as accurate as possible," Thomas told reporters last year.)

But Hollywood has long been conflicted when it comes to telling the stories of mixed-race people. In 1949, Lena Horne was up for the title role in Elia Kazan's "Pinky," playing a light-skinned black woman who looked white. Jeanne Crain, who was white, got the part. In 1951, Horne was slated to play "Julie," the "tragic mulatto" in "Show Boat." But Hollywood wasn't too comfortable with interracial love scenes, so Ava Gardner ultimately got the part, and makeup artists used Horne's makeup (Max Factor's "Egyptian Tan") to give Gardner that cafe-au-lait look.

In the late 1920s, Fredi Washington was green-eyed, white-skinned, straight-haired -- and black. Studio suits reportedly gave her a choice: If you want to be a movie star, you've got to pass for white. Instead, Washington carved a career for herself acting in "race movies" with African American directors like Oscar Micheaux -- in brownface, lest anyone think that Paul Robeson was wooing a white girl.

It's ironic that Washington's one mainstream Hollywood role was her tragic turn as Peola in the Academy Award-nominated "Imitation of Life"(1934) -- playing a white-looking black girl who abandoned her dark-skinned mother in her quest to pass.

Hollywood, not to mention America, saw only trouble in shades of beige.

Staff writer Desson Thomson contributed to this report.