Clockwise from main:
Passing
protagonists Clare (Ruth Negga, left) and Irene (Tessa Thompson);
Alamy, Shutterstock
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Rebecca Hall was given a copy of Passing, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom was passing for white and married to a racist white man. It was a “revelation” for the actor, who had been getting to grips with her own family’s history; the actor’s father was the late, English theatre director Sir Peter Hall, and her mother was Marie Ewing, a Detroit-born biracial opera singer.