EDWIN “Countryman” Lothan, star of the movie Countryman, died in September at age 70.

He succumbed to lung cancer at home in his beloved Hellshire, St Catherine. Countryman became a household name through the 1982 film of the same name, which was written and directed by Dickie Jobson and produced by Chris Blackwell.

“I was introduced to him by my best friend, Dickie Jobson, and two other friends, Sally and Perry Henzel, who did the film The Harder They Come,” Blackwell recalled in a 2014 interview with journalist Rob Kenner.

“Countryman escaped from his home when he was five or six and grew up on his own in the swamp in a very isolated part of Jamaica. When we met him he was very cheerful, very bright. He had little or nothing. He lived on the beach; he had a sheet of zinc over the roof. We came one time and found the zinc wasn’t there because his wife wanted a radio, so he sold the piece of zinc in order to get her a radio and now they literally had no roof over their head,” Blackwell added. “But his whole energy was full of joy, not complaining about anything. The fact that he could run barefoot through the swamps, we were saying, ‘This is incredible; we should really do a film with

Countryman‘.”

Countryman was cast in Perry Henzell’s second film, the unreleased No Place Like Home.

He is survived by two children John and Indiria.

— Howard Campbell