Helen Kamperveen: ‘I am entitled to a seat at the table’

She is 74 and her career is on the rise. Actress Helen Kamperveen can be seen in two feel-good films this winter: First Aid At Christmas (on Videoland) and the cinema film Take me with you – both by director Will Koopman. In Take me with you six people in their seventies who don’t know each other go on a trip to France together. Kamperveen plays one of the leading roles, alongside Jeroen Krabbé, Renée Soutendijk, Olga Zuiderhoek, Kees Hulst and Geert de Jong. “Sometimes I think: I can squeeze my hands,” she says. “There were no roles for older actors for a long time. Not to mention roles for black actors.”

Colonial-style fans spin at the top of Amsterdam’s Café Americain. Exuberant Tiffany lamps hang underneath. Kamperveen tries to lure the extremely courteous waiter out of his tent. “What is your preference?” she asks him when he presents the tea box. He loses his lines for a moment. “The green one,” he says. She’s unsure, maybe she’ll take chamomile. She: “But that’s more for when you’re sick, right?” He: “Or to be even more relaxed here.” Our table offers a view of the Stadsschouwburg, where she played the famous prostitute Maxi Linder at the beginning of this century, in The Queen of Paramaribo.

She will soon also be in a commercial, she says with enjoyment. For plant-based Campina. Many actors turn their noses up at advertising, well not her. “I thought it was super funny to see how that works. All those people on set monitoring everything. The writers, the customers.” Never before had she been asked to do advertising as an actress. As a photo model, she once advertised Agio Tip, “the cigar with the white filter”.

Floor

Helen Kamperveen has been an actress for almost four decades. “She adds depth to every character role, without denying herself as a woman of color,” wrote the jury that awarded her the Colombina in 2022, a theater prize for the most impressive female supporting role. That year she also received the Black Achievement Oeuvre Award, presented annually to someone from the black community who has made an important contribution to Dutch society. Subtly: “It was from our own people. They know that I have an oeuvre.”

The Colombina sees them as recognition from a different audience. “An audience that probably didn’t even come to see our performances in the past.” Being asked for Take me with you also felt like recognition. “It’s a big film, with big names. I don’t have many films to my name, I’m more into theatre.” To her annoyance, it felt like a burden during the recordings. “I was in a company of people who have long made their mark in film. You still have the feeling: I am the outsider, I have to do my very best. You shouldn’t have that, it hinders you. It was tough to play that role. Yes, I thought it was spicy.”

Hotel in Baker Street

Her career started as a photo model. As a seventeen-year-old, she was scouted for a three-month job in London, and she left the Kleinkunstacademie for it. “A fantastic time. I was a model in a showroom, at 1.71 meters I am too short for haute couture. When customers came you had to show the collection and we sat and chatted for the rest of the day. But I made good money. And I was in a hotel, on Baker Street of all places. I really walked around there like a kid in a candy store.”

It was a time when there was no makeup for black models. “The make-up artists could not make me up, I always had make-up with me. I have felt lonely at times. I was standing in the toilet again fixing my hair because it didn’t look right, even though I had just come from the hairdresser.” She once reported another beautiful girl to her modeling agency. “A Dutch girl with African blood, so colored, brown. They said: But don’t we already have you? Guffaws. “Then you realize: it is not about who you are, but about what you represent.”

A home game

Something has changed, she thinks. She especially notices this in young personal assistants at the movies, and the young people who do the clothing and sets in the theater. “They look more inclusive. They grew up with friends from different cultures and stayed with people from different cultures. We are not much of an attraction to them.”

She also mentions the recently published Dutch crime series Santos, featuring an almost entirely non-white cast. “I can tell from those people that they are playing a home game. The looseness, not walking on eggshells. I see them being themselves. That is something we do not easily show. We always wear a kind of straitjacket. The straitjacket of adjustment.” About Santos she had a discussion with a white woman she knows well. “She said: a series with only black actors, that is not the intention, it must be mixed. I said to her: you have to look carefully. John Buijsman, a white actor, also stars Santos. But he plays the role we normally play in your series: the loner who occasionally delivers a letter. What bothers you is that all the main characters are black. Conversely, we have been used to this for years. Bee Penoza Have you ever thought: where are the black people? We thought so.”

Kamperveen thinks it is only a good thing if more roles are created for black actors due to the attention to diversity. “There are people who say: you should be asked because you are good. Yes, you should be asked because you are good. But you can also be good and never be asked.”

Radio maker

Kamperveen lived in Suriname for a large part of her life. Not as a child: she was born as Helen Lochem in Curaçao, where her Surinamese mother had gone to work as a nurse to earn more. Her Surinamese father worked in the drawing room at Shell. After they divorced, her mother raised her four daughters alone and took them to the Netherlands in 1964.

Helen first went to live in Suriname when she married radio maker Johnny Kamperveen in 1972. They had three sons. After the December murders in 1982, they left everything behind and fled to the Netherlands. André Kamperveen, Johnny’s father, was one of the fifteen men murdered by Desi Bouterse’s military regime. “For a long time our lives were dominated by December 8.”

In retrospect, the flight was a turning point in her career. “In the Netherlands I was asked again for a show, for the new lingerie line of an important fashion designer. I thought: no, I don’t just want to be beautiful and walk on stage anymore. I want it to be about something.” She focused on acting. Her first major stage role was that of Blanche in Tram line Desirein 1986. In the early 1990s, she played a sexologist in the popular TV series Medical Center West.

She sometimes refused roles that she found stereotypical. “Then I had to play a maid who came up twice and was allowed to say ‘here’s the coffee’. There are many black servants, they said, how stereotypical. Yes, I said, but there are also black doctors and black lawyers. As long as you think we’re just servants, or cleaners, or hookers, it’s stereotyping. I did play a cleaning lady in The girls by Jean Genet. But that’s a character that’s going through development. That piece is about those cleaning ladies.”

Cotton fields

Although she remained successful in the Netherlands, she moved back to Suriname in the mid-1990s. “Look, we fled. The idea was to go back someday. That won over my career drive.” In 2003, her husband died of a bacterial infection. She started a youth theater school in Paramaribo, which she led for eight years. “By that time my youngest son had almost finished school and then he would go to Holland. I wanted to go back to my sisters, who also live in the Netherlands. Plus: Bouterse came up with an amnesty law (to protect the perpetrators of the December murders from prosecution).” She settled back in the Netherlands.

Bouterse’s final conviction last month did her good. “I am glad that justice has been done. For a long time I thought that would never happen.” She also appreciated the apologies for the history of slavery by Prime Minister Rutte and the king. “At first I thought: guys, We haven’t been in the cotton fields, have they? Now I know that was a very stupid thought. I’ve read a lot about generationally transmitted trauma. Many things in our culture come from the past of slavery. It’s in your DNA.”

She has not researched her own family tree. She still wants to do that. “I want to know it all. My mother told me all kinds of things. I have an Indian grandmother and a Chinese this and a Jewish that. Then I sometimes said: but where are the black Africans? Look at us, there must have been a few. My mother grew up in a time when you were happy if you were closer in color to those in power. When I whined about racism in the Netherlands, she said: ‘Helen, it is those people’s country. If you don’t like it, why don’t you go live in Curaçao or Suriname?’ Now I think: what do you mean? I have been Dutch since birth. My ancestors were brought from Africa and settled in Suriname. I am entitled to one seat at the table.”

She has not found new love. Not in Suriname, not even in the Netherlands. “No, very strange. When my husband died I was 53. Two of my sisters had been alone for quite a while after their divorce. I said, I’m not going to do that. I hate being alone, I’m a woman to be with a man. But that candle has gone out. I just haven’t seen him again. Not someone I have more with than my husband. And I’m not going to have a relationship with just anyone. I’m not on dating sites, I don’t want to think about it. Do you know what it is? When you are younger, you choose someone and develop together. But now I am already so… formed.” Gushing: “It’s a miracle if I ever meet anyone who can tolerate me.”

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