Louis Gossett Jr. in a throwback photo. (politeness: X)
Los Angeles:
Louis Gossett Jr., who won an Emmy for Roots and an Academy Award for An Officer and a Gentleman, has died. He was 87, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The actor died at a rehabilitation center in Santa Monica, California. Although Gossett’s exact cause of death is unknown, he had recently suffered from respiratory illness and prostate cancer.
In a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, his family said: “It is with our sincere regret that we must confirm that our beloved father passed away this morning. We would like to thank everyone for their compassion at this time. Please respect the family’s privacy during this time. difficult time.”
Gossett was menacing in several difficult roles, most notably in Taylor Hackford’s Officer and a Gentleman (1982), where he played Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley and Richard Gere’s character ruthlessly (but for his own good) at an officer candidate school before engaging in an unforgettable martial arts duel. Gossett had a slim, bald head and the physique of an athlete.
He was the second black man to win an Oscar for acting, after Sidney Poitier in 1964.
For the role, the 6-foot-2 Gossett trained for 30 days with the Marine Corps Recruitment Division, an adjunct to Camp Pendleton north of San Diego. “I knew I had to let myself go through this all-encompassing transformation at least to some extent,” Gossett wrote in his 2010 biography, An Actor and a Gentleman.
Gossett began his Hollywood career in 1959 as George Murchison in the original Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s family tragedy A Raisin in the Sun. He later co-starred with Poitier and Ruby Dee in the 1961 Columbia film adaptation of Daniel Petrie.
His first major taste of national fame came from his eloquent performance in the eight-part ABC miniseries Roots, where he played Fiddler, an elderly slave who taught a young Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) to speak English. Eighty-five percent of Americans watched at least some of Roots, and in January 1977, the show’s conclusion drew more than 100 million people.
“All the top African-American actors were asked, and I begged to be there,” Gossett once said. “I got the best role, I think. It was great.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gossett also starred in the critically acclaimed telefilm Sadat (1983), playing the assassinated Egyptian leader (Sadat’s widow, Jehan, personally chose him for the role), and portrayed an immortal baseball player in Don’. Look back: the story of Leroy Satchel Paige in a 1981 telefilm.
During his more than 60-year career, Gossett excelled in a number of non-stereotypical racial roles, playing a hospital chief of staff in the 1979 ABC series The Lazarus Syndrome and the title character Gideon Oliver, a professor of anthropology, on a 1989 set of ABC mystery films.
Gossett was born on May 27, 1936 in the melting pot of Brooklyn, the son of a doorman (who was adopted and raised by an Italian family) and a maid. At Abraham Lincoln High School, he was class president and played on the baseball, track and basketball teams; he would later be invited to the New York Knicks’ rookie camp.
Gossett became interested in acting after missing a season of high school basketball due to a leg injury. His English instructor introduced him to the makers of the 1953 Broadway production Take a Giant Step. After beating out more than 400 other candidates to get the lead role at the age of 17, he received the Donaldson Award for Best Rookie of the year.
Gossett joined James Dean as a friend at the Actors Studio in New York after accepting a theater scholarship to NYU. He made his film debut in 1957 in the NBC anthology series The Big Story.
In 1964, he, Lola Falana and Mae Barnes sang in the cast of America, Be Seated, a “modern minstrel show” produced by Mike Todd Jr. and played at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Two years later, he co-wrote the anti-war song Handsome Johnny for Richie Havens’ first album, a tune the folk legend performed as the opening act at Woodstock three years later.
Gossett next played an angry man living in a dilapidated apartment building in Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970), a con man opposite James Garner in the slavery-era Skin Game (1971), a murderous drug dealer in The Deep (1977), a director of Toy Soldiers (1991) and a down-and-out boxer in Diggstown (1992), according to The Hollywood Reporter.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by WhatsNew2Day staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)