Trailblazing black Oscar winner Louis Gossett Jr dead at 87
>> LOS ANGELES: Louis Gossett Jr, the first black man to win a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance as a hard-man drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman, has died. He was 87.
Gossett’s family said he died Thursday night in Los Angeles without stating the cause, multiple US media outlets including CBS News reported.
Gossett appeared in more than 60 movies, and in 1983 became the third Black actor — after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier — to win an Academy Award, for his supporting role as a stern gunnery sergeant in Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman.
The movie also netted the actor a Golden Globe, and he later picked up another supporting actor Globe for The Josephine Baker Story, as well as an Emmy for the ABC miniseries Roots.
The New York native, who announced in 2010 that he had prostate cancer, cultivated a tough guy image that paid dividends in a slew of action movies, including Iron Eagle (1986) and The Punisher (1989).
Gossett chronicled his painful experiences as a trailblazing black actor in his memoir, An Actor and a Gentleman, including his first trip to Los Angeles in the 1960s when he was pulled over by police four times during a single car journey.
“The only time I was really free was when the director said ‘action’ in front of a camera or on the stage and that’s when I flew,” he told the The Los Angeles Times in 2008.
Divorced from his third wife in 1992, Gossett lived in Malibu, California and raised two sons.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 27, 1936, and cut his teeth on stage in Take a Giant Step, which was selected as one of the 10 best Broadway shows of 1953 by The New York Times.
He won a part in the 1959 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun before making his Hollywood debut alongside Poitier in the film version two years later.
His other credits include The Deep, Blue Chips, Daddy’s Little Girls, Firewalker and Jaws-3D.