First black performer to win Oscar for best supporting actor dies

LOUIS GOSSETT JR: 1936-2024

Louis Gossett Jr., who took home an Academy Award for An Officer and a Gentleman and an Emmy for Roots, both times playing a mature man who guides a younger one taking on a new role but in drastically different circumstances, has died aged 87.

Gossett was 46 when he played Emil Foley, the Marine drill instructor from hell who ultimately shapes the humanity of an emotionally damaged young Naval aviation recruit (Richard Gere) in An Officer and a Gentleman. Reviewing the movie in The New York Times, Vincent Canby described Sergeant Foley as a cruel taskmaster “recycled as a man of recognisable cunning, dedication and humour” revealed in “the kind of performance that wins awards.”

Gossett told The Times that he had recognised the role’s worth immediately. “The words just tasted good,” he recalled.

When he accepted the Oscar for best supporting actor in 1983, he was the first black performer to win in that category, and only the third (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier) to win an Academy Award for acting.

Gossett, a versatile actor, played a range of parts in his long career. But he was best known for playing decent, plain-spoken men, often authority figures.

Actress Susan Sarandon (left) and actor Christopher Reeve flank Louis Gossett Jr, winner of the 1982 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

By the time he won his Oscar, he had already won an Emmy as Fiddler, the mentor of the lead character, Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton), in the blockbuster 1977 mini-series Roots.

Fiddler was, as the name suggested, a musician, an enslaved man on an 18th-century Virginia plantation. Gossett was not thrilled about the role at first. “Why choose me to play the Uncle Tom?” he remembered thinking in a 2018 Television Academy video interview.

But he came to admire the survival skills of forebears like Fiddler, he said, and based the character on his grandparents and a great-grandmother.

That portrayal, he said, became “a tribute to all those people who taught me how to behave.”

Louis Gossett as Fiddler (left), with Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) in the 1977 mini-series Roots.

Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. was born on May 27, 1936, in Brooklyn, the only child of Louis Gossett, a porter, and Helen (Wray) Gossett, a nurse. He made his Broadway debut when he was 17 and still a high school student.

While healing after a basketball injury, he appeared in a school play, just to occupy his time. Impressed, a teacher suggested that he audition for Take a Giant Step, a play by Louis Peterson that was opening at the Lyceum Theatre in the fall of 1953. He won the lead role, that of Spencer Scott, a troubled adolescent.

Sidney Fields devoted a column in The Sunday Mirror to the young man, who shared his career plans. “I always wanted to study pharmacy,” Gossett said. “But now after college I’ll try acting. I know it’s a tough business, but if I fail, I’ll have the pharmacy degree to fall back on.”

In 1955, he returned to Broadway, in William Marchant’s comedy The Desk Set. Gossett made his film debut as an annoying college man in A Raisin in the Sun (1961), an adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play that starred Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee.

Before becoming a film star, Gossett had a thriving theatre career. In less than a decade he landed six Broadway roles, including that of a Harlem hustler in Tambourines to Glory (1963), a South African grandfather’s servant in The Zulu and the Zayda (1965), a lawyer who had killed a white man in a civil rights demonstration in My Sweet Charlie (1966) and the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in Dangerous Angels (1971).

In the mid-1960s, he replaced the actor playing the big-time boxing promoter Eddie Satin in the musical Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis Jr. His most unfortunate role may have been as a Black man with a white slave in Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights (1968), a comedy written by Robert Alan Aurthur and directed by Sidney Poitier. The play, which Clive Barnes of The Times called racist, closed after a week.

Gossett never committed to another Broadway role. But he appeared for four nights as the flashy lawyer Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago in 2002.

In the 1960s, he also performed as a folk singer in Greenwich Village coffee houses. He and Richie Havens co-wrote the antiwar song Handsome Johnny, which Havens recorded in 1966 and later sang at Woodstock.

‘The arts can achieve [social change] overnight. Millions of people are watching. We can get to them quicker than anybody else.’

Louis Gossett Jr

His dozens of feature films included The Landlord (1970), in which he played a man on the brink of insanity; Travels With My Aunt (1972); and The Deep (1977), as a Bahamian drug dealer. His later films included Diggstown (1992), in which he played a boxer, and the movie version of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (1994), in which he played a bar owner.

Gossett made more than 100 television appearances, ranging from lighthearted comedies like The Partridge Family to dramas like Madam Secretary. He played the title role, a Columbia anthropology professor who investigates crimes, on the short-lived 1989 series Gideon Oliver.

He continued to act until last year, when he was seen in the film version of the Broadway musical The Colour Purple.

Gossett’s marriage to Hattie Glascoe in 1964 lasted only five months. He and Christina Mangosing married in 1973, had one child and divorced after two years. His 1987 marriage to Cyndi James Reese ended in divorce in 1992.

In the Television Academy interview, Gossett urged fellow actors to help effect political and social change in a disturbing world. “The arts can achieve it overnight,” he said. “Millions of people are watching.” He added, “We can get to them quicker than anybody else.”

Gossett is survived by his sons, Satie and Sharron Gossett, and several grandchildren.

The New York Times

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