IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Oscar-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr. dies
LOS ANGELES — Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal TV miniseries “Roots,” has died. He was 87.
Gossett’s first cousin Neal L. Gossett said the actor died in Santa Monica, California. A statement from the family said Gossett died Friday morning. No cause of death was revealed.
Gossett’s cousin remembered a man who walked with Nelson Mandela and who also was a great joke teller, a relative who faced and fought racism with dignity and humor.
“Never mind the awards, never mind the glitz and glamour, the Rolls-royces and the big houses in Malibu. It’s about the humanity of the people that he stood for,” his cousin said.
Louis Gossett always thought of his early career as a reverse Cinderella story, with success finding him from an early age and propelling him forward, toward his Academy Award for “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Gossett broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries “Roots,” which depicted the atrocities of slavery on TV.
Gossett became the third Black Oscar nominee in the supporting actor category in 1983. He won for his performance as the intimidating Marine drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” opposite Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won a Golden Globe for the same role.
Louis Cameron Gossett was born on May 27, 1936, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, N.Y., to Louis Sr., a porter, and Hellen, a nurse. He later added Jr. to his name to honor his father.
After becoming a star on Broadway, Gossett went to Hollywood for the first time in 1961 to make the film version of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He had bitter memories of
that trip, staying in a cockroach-infested motel that was one of the few places to allow Black people.
He said winning an Oscar didn’t change the fact that all his roles were supporting ones.
Over the years, his career included work on stage, television and film. In 2023, he played an obstinate patriarch in the remake of “The Color Purple.”
Beyoncé’s album ‘Cowboy Carter’ adopts opera, too
You don’t need opera glasses to see that Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” takes on more than just country music.
Nearly two minutes into “Daughter,” a track of balladlike storytelling, she inserts a famous operatic song from the 18th century: “Caro Mio Ben.” And, in Beyoncé fashion, she makes it her own.
Singers of all vocal types have performed “Caro Mio Ben”; most of them have been from the opera world, including it on recital programs. But as the song has been adapted for high and low ranges, its sound has stayed more or less the same.
It was written in the early 1780s by a member of the Giordano family. At different points it has been attributed to Giuseppe or his likely older brother Tommaso. (This history is all a bit hazy.) And, like many Italian arias and songs, its lyric is brief. The singer expresses heartache in the absence of a loved one, and begs for the end of a conflict with them before returning to the sentiment of the pain caused by loss.
Like much music of longing and sorrow from this time — such as the sadly beautiful arias of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operas — “Caro Mio Ben” is in a major key, and has endured as such for more than two centuries as a concert and recording staple. But that’s also where Beyoncé comes in.
“Daughter” excerpts “Caro Mio Ben” as a bridge and distorts its major-key atmosphere into a minor one to fit with the rest of the song. After opening with a moody guitar ostinato, Beyoncé enters with the
dark, melodramatic storytelling of a murder ballad, with a refrain like something out of “Carmen” in its bravado and rustic flavor. In Beyoncé’s “If you cross me, I’m just like my father/i am colder than Titanic water,” you can hear a spiritual descendant of Carmen’s warning to “be on your guard” from another opera classic, the Habanera.
Beyoncé keeps “Caro Mio Ben” in its original Italian, but its melancholy and yearning get across the feeling of the text, which complicates the rest of the song, introducing to her toughness a vulnerability and desire for peace — most ardent in the wailing and ghostly vocalise, or wordless singing, that follows.
She doesn’t have the voice of an opera singer, but that doesn’t really matter. “Caro Mio Ben” is not an aria from opera; it is a song, and was most likely performed in its time in intimate settings, with the comparatively direct, human-scale sound you hear in “Daughter.”
What’s more significant is that Beyoncé finds in this old tune a quality shared by the finest music from any century: something to say.