Louis Gossett Jr., who became the first African-American to win an Oscar and an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the seminal TV miniseries “Roots,” has died. He was 87 years old.
Gossett’s nephew told The Associated Press that Gossett died Thursday night in Santa Monica, California. His cause of death has not been disclosed.
Gossett always thought of his early career as a reverse Cinderella story, finding success at an early age and working his way to an Academy Award for An Officer and a Gentleman.
He earned his first acting credit in the Brooklyn high school production of You Can’t Take It with You while he was away from the basketball team due to injury.
“I was hooked, and so was the audience,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, The Actor and the Gentleman.
His English teacher encouraged him to go to Manhattan to “Take a Giant Step.” He won the role and made his Broadway debut in 1953 at the age of 16.
“I knew too little to be nervous,” Gossett wrote. “In hindsight, I should have been scared to death going up on that stage, but I wasn’t.”
Gossett attended New York University on scholarships for basketball and theater. He soon began acting and singing on television shows hosted by David Susskind, Ed Sullivan, Red Buttons, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar, and Steve Allen.
Gossett befriended James Dean and studied acting with Marilyn Monroe, Martin Landau, and Steve McQueen at the Actors Studio branch taught by Frank Silvera.
In 1959, Gossett received critical acclaim for her role in the Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun, alongside Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands.
He became a Broadway star in 1964 when he replaced Billy Daniels as Sammy Davis Jr. in Golden Boy.
Gossett first came to Hollywood in 1961 to make the film version of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He has bitter memories of staying in a cockroach-infested motel on one of his trips, one of the few places where black people could stay.
In 1968, he returned to Hollywood and played a major role in NBC’s first made-for-TV movie, A Companion in Nightmare, starring Melvin Douglas, Anne Baxter, and Patrick O’Neill.
This time, Gossett was booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Universal Studios lent him a convertible. As he collected his car and headed back to the hotel, he was stopped by a Los Angeles County sheriff who ordered him to turn down his radio and raise the roof of his car before releasing him.
Within minutes, eight deputies stopped him, forced him to lean against his car and open the trunk, while they called the rental car company before releasing him.
“I knew I had no choice but to endure this abuse, but it was a terrible way to treat me and I felt humiliated,” Gossett wrote in her memoir. “I realized this was happening because I was black and I was showing off in a luxury car. In their view, I didn’t have the right to drive.”
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped a block away by a police officer who told him he had violated a law that prohibits walking in residential neighborhoods in Beverly Hills after 9 p.m. Two other officers arrived and said Gossett was chained up. He was trapped in a tree and handcuffed for three hours. He was eventually released when his original police car returned.
“Now I was facing racism and it was an ugly sight,” he wrote. “But it wasn’t going to destroy me.”
Gossett said that in the late 1990s, he was driving his restored 1986 Rolls-Royce Corniche II when he was stopped by police on the Pacific Coast Highway. The officer told him that Gossett looked like the person they were looking for, but the officer recognized Gossett and left.
He founded the Erasism Foundation to help build a world free of racism.
Gossett has had a series of guest appearances on shows such as “Bonanza,” “The Rockford Files,” “The Mod Squad,” “McLeod,” and co-starred with Richard Pryor on “The Partridge Family.” It was memorable.
In August 1969, Gossett and members of the Mamas and the Papas were invited to the house of actor Sharon Tate for a party. He went home first to take a shower and change his clothes. As he prepared to leave, he saw a news bulletin on television about Tate’s murder. That night, she and others were murdered by Charles Manson’s associates.
“There must have been a reason why I escaped the bullet,” he wrote.
Lewis Cameron Gossett was born on May 27, 1936 in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Lewis Sr., a porter, and Helen, a nurse. He later added Junior to his name in honor of his father.
Gossett broke out on the small screen as a fiddler in the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots, which depicted the brutality of slavery on television. It featured a wide-ranging cast, including Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton, and John Amos.
In 1983, Gossett became the third black person to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Gossett won for his performance as an intimidating marine drill instructor in The Officer and a Gentleman, co-starring Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won a Golden Globe Award for the same role.
“More than anything, it was a great affirmation of my position as a black actor,” he wrote in his memoir.
“The Oscar helped me pick good roles in movies like ‘Enemy Mine,’ ‘Sadat,’ and ‘Iron Eagle,'” Gossett said in Dave Karger’s 2024 book, “50 Oscar Nights”.
He said his statue is in storage.
“I’m going to donate it to the library, so I don’t have to monitor it,” he says in the book. “You have to be free of that.”
Gossett appeared in television movies such as “The Satchel Page Story”, “Backstairs in the White House”, “The Josephine Baker Story”, which again won a Golden Globe Award, and “Roots Revisited”.
But he said winning the Oscar doesn’t change the fact that all of his roles were supporting roles.
He played a stubborn patriarch in this movie. 2023 remake of “The Color Purple.”
Gossett struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction for years after winning the Oscar. He went to a rehab facility where he was diagnosed with toxic mold syndrome, which he attributed to his home in Malibu.
In 2010, Gossett announced that he had prostate cancer, but said it was discovered at an early stage. In 2020, she was hospitalized with COVID-19.
He leaves behind his son Sati, a producer and director from his second marriage, and Sharon, a chef who adopted the 7-year-old after seeing him on a TV show about children in desperate situations. .
His cousin is actor Robert Gossett.
Gossett’s first marriage to Hattie Glascoe was annulled. The second was with Christina Mangosing, who he divorced in 1975, and the third was with actor Cindy James Rees in 1992.
