RICHARD ROUNDTREE
Shaft actor (1942–2023)
WHEN MGM rst planned to turn Ernest Tidyman’s novel about a black private detective named John Sha into a movie, the part was initially recast for a white actor. Gordon Parks, a noted black photographer who was stepping up to direct his rst feature lm, rejected the airbrushed screenplay. He insisted on a black actor and cast Richard Roundtree as the eponymous hero.
The resulting 1971 movie Sha promoted Roundtree’s character as “a man of air and amboyance who has fun at the expense of the establishment”. Supported by Isaac Hayes’ hit theme song, the lm was a box oce hit, grossing $13 million ($100 million in today’s money) and launched the Blaxploitation genre, opening the door to a generation of black lmmakers and performers.
Born in New Rochelle, Roundtree honed his acting skills with New York’s Negro Ensemble Company while working as a cab driver by day. He was on tour with the company in Philadelphia when he heard about the auditions for Sha and was picked out by Parks despite his lack of movie experience.
He reprised his lead role in the sequels Sha ’s Big Score! (1972) and Sha In Africa (1973). Seeking to expand his appeal beyond the Blaxploitation genre, he appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in 1981’s Inchon and alongside Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in 1984’s City Heat. However, aside from the Sha franchise, the lm of which he was most proud was 1996’s Once Upon A Time … When We Were Colored, about a black family growing up in a segregated 1950s Deep South populated by the Ku Klux Klan, based on Cli on Taulbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir.
When the Sha franchise was revived in 2000, Roundtree became ‘Uncle John Sha ’, 30 years older and wiser and dispensing advice to Samuel L Jackson in the lead role. He and Jackson returned in the same roles for a Sha movie in 2019.