MARCELL, MORESO

While looking through Wikipedia for fictional TV butlers, I stumbled across this crossover:

GEOFFREY BUTLER
from The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. Geoffrey's portrayer, Joseph Marcell, plays the recurring role of Massimo Marone's butler on The Bold And The Beautiful, who used to work for a family in Beverly Hills (a reference to his role on The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air)

However, his name in 'The Bold And The Beautiful' was Hudson. But the following entry could give the splainin for that.....

Also from Wikipedia:
Geoffrey Barbara Butler (played by Joseph Marcell), born in Saint Lucia in August 1947, serves as the Banks family's cynical butler. Geoffrey is the first character that appears on screen in the pilot episode "The Fresh Prince Project". He is seen going to answer the door to Will, who mistakes him for Philip.

In addition to four years at the University of Oxford and a long career working for British aristocrats, Geoffrey was an Olympic runner several years before being hired by the Banks family (as revealed in the episode "It's Better to Have Loved and Lost It..." from the fourth season, when Geoffrey shows the Banks family a videotape of a documentary called "Shame of a Nation"), but fled his home country in shame after being exposed for cheating while participating in the men's marathon at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, winning a Gold Medal at the marathon only because he had taken a cab ride to the stadium parking lot; Shortly after receiving his medal, Queen Elizabeth II, who apparently presented the medals, got word of Geoffrey's cheating, [pushed] aside the bronze medalist to hit Geoffrey with her purse and rip the medal off his neck; Geoffrey then ran from the stadium in shame.

In the 1970s, he was a butler for the band Led Zeppelin. In the early 1980s, Geoffrey was sparring butler for Chuck Norris. In the episode "Nice Lady", he reveals having practiced Greco-Roman wrestling in his youth.

I would think that Geoffrey changed his name to Hudson in order to avoid having to account for his shady past in the Olympics, especially since he was going to work for a new employer.

(This may be Hudson with his back to the camera.  Google offered it up when I used "Joseph Marcell", "Bold & The Beautiful", and "Hudson" as search criteria.)

I was hoping to find another character played by Joseph Marcell who could be considered as Geoffrey, even with a name change. That way I'd have next year's inductee into the TV Crossover Hall of Fame for Black History Month 2013 (if we survive the Mayan Apocalypse, that is!) I'm still studying Marcell's resume for that, but in the meantime I found this frame grab of Geoffrey with the quote that goes with it:

Geoffrey may not know of assassin's bullets personally, but it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that he had at least one relative to have come into close contact with an assassination.

Freddie Ruingo is a lawyer in the African nation of Naranga, working as a barrister in the capital city of Nova Lombara. He worked with Horace Rumpole on a murder case, defending the leader of the APU Party, David Mazenze. Rumpole was able to get him acquitted of that death penalty charge, but at the cost of Mazenze's standing within the political party.

After Rumpole returned to the United Kingdom, Mazenze was gunned down (probably by his former followers.)

I bring this up because it would appear - within the reality of Toobworld - that Freddie Ruingo was an identical cousin to Geoffrey "Hudson" Butler....

In other words - for those new to this blog - Joseph Marcell played Freddie as well as Geoffrey and Hudson.

BCnU!