Charismatic actor who starred in Alien and Homicide
Yaphet Kotto 1939-2021
Originally a stage actor, Yaphet Kotto, who has died aged 81, established himself as a screen star with his scene-stealing performance in the 1973 Bond film Live and Let Die. In a dual role, Kotto played Dr Kananga, the corrupt dictator of a fictional Caribbean island, and his alter ego, fearsome Harlem gangster Mr Big. Released at the height of the Blaxploitation era, it was the first Bond film to have a black villain, and the first to have a black woman as 007’s love interest (Gloria Hendry); but when Kotto gave a black power salute at an early press junket, producers started to become anxious about how a black Bond villain would be received, said The Times. Kotto was left out of other publicity events, and was not invited to the film’s premiere. “I went through a lot of goddamn emotional hell because they were afraid people would be angry that a black guy was not being Sidney Poitier,” he said.
Yaphet Kotto was born in Harlem in 1939, the son of a Cameroonian businessman, who was Jewish, and a nurse who converted to Judaism. His parents separated when he was three, and he was mainly brought up by his grandparents in the Bronx. Aged 16, he wandered into a cinema in Times Square, and saw Marlon Brando on screen for the first time, in On the Waterfront.
“It was like somebody had punched me in the stomach,” he said, of Brando’s performance. “It was like someone had crashed cymbals in both ears. I was blasted out of the theatre. I knew from that moment that I wanted to be an actor.” He dropped out of school, and enrolled in the Actors Studio. It was, unusually, a welfare officer who spotted his potential when he visited the family, and read a play Kotto had written. The man introduced Kotto to his aunt, a theatre producer in Cape Cod – who cast him, aged 19, in the lead role in Othello. After that, various established stars mentored him, including Judy Holliday, Barbara Stanwyck and Mary Astor; and in 1969, he took over from James Earl Jones in a Broadway production of The Great White Hope, about the boxer Jack Johnson.
On the big screen, he was in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and starred in Blaxploitation movies such as The Limit (which he also directed); on the small screen, he played Idi Amin in 1977’s Raid on Entebbe. In 1979, he was cast in what is perhaps his most enduring role, as the chief engineer in Alien (opposite his friend Harry Dean Stanton). Kotto recalled seeing the vast sets for the first time, and realising that they risked dwarfing him. “So I made the character even larger than the sets.” After that, Gene Roddenberry offered him the role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation – but Kotto (to his later regret) turned it down, thinking he’d done enough scifi. He showed his talent for comedy as an FBI agent in Midnight Run (1988); and for six years in the 1990s, he was the kindly, Italian-speaking unit commander Lt Al Giardello in David Simon’s Baltimore-set drama Homicide: Life on the Street. He starred in all 122 episodes, and wrote some of them. He had such an impact, he was asked to run for mayor of Baltimore.
Although his “default mode was an alert, world-wise energy”, Kotto was a hugely versatile actor, who never turned in a disappointing performance, said Matt Zoller Seitz on RogerEbert.com. He was, however, frustrated by the limited range of roles he was offered. “I’m always called powerful, bulky or imposing,” he said in 1993. “I’m a 200-pound, 6ft 3in black guy. And I think I have this image of a monster. It’s very difficult.” In his 1997 memoir he revealed that he was descended from Cameroon royalty, and that he would have gone there to be installed as a prince, had he not been busy making films.