James Lloydovich Patterson

James Lloydovich Patterson (, ; 17 July 1933 – 22 May 2025) was a Russian-American writer, naval officer, and child actor. Born in Russia, he was of African American and Russian descent.

Life and career James Lloydovich Patterson was born in Moscow on 17 July 1933, the eldest of three sons born to an African American immigrant to the Soviet Union and his Russian wife. Having traveled to the USSR with Langston Hughes and others in 1932 to participate in Black and White, a Soviet film highlighting the effects of racism in the United States, James Patterson's father Lloyd Walton Patterson, just 22, decided to remain permanently after meeting and falling in love with James' mother, the artist-designer Vera Ippolitovna Aralova.

Patterson appeared in the Soviet cinema as a toddler in the 1936 hit Soviet film Circuswhere, parallel to his own life, he played the role of the dark-skinned child of an interracial couple. It was his only film appearance.

James was a member of the Komsomol and graduated from the Riga Nakhimov Naval School, a prestigious military academy for boys of high-school age, in 1951.

Patterson died on 22 May 2025, at the age of 91.

Selected works Россия. Африка (Russia. Africa, poems, 1963) Хроника левой руки: Новеллы. М., 1964 (Chronicles of the Left Hand: Novellas, 1964) Рождение ливня (Birth of the Rain, poems, 1973) Взаимодействие (Interaction, poems, 1978) Зимние ласточки (Winter Swallows, poems, 1980) Красная лилия (The Red Lily, poems, 1984)