Hollywood actor David Oyelowo 'had to leave Britain' for career

David Oyelowo, who plays Martin Luther King in the Oscar-nominated Hollywood film "Selma", says he had to leave Britain because of a lack of opportunities for black actors. "We make period dramas (in Britain), but there are almost never black people in them, even though we've been on these shores for hundreds of years," Oyelowo said in an interview with the Radio Times. "I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that if it's not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don't understand," he told the television listings magazine. Oyelowo, who returned to London at 13 after spending some of his childhood in Nigeria, first came to prominence with a series of performances for the Royal Shakespeare Company in his early 20s.

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