First Black actor to win supporting Oscar
Starred in Roots, An Officer and a Gentleman
I HAD COME FACE-TO-FACE WITH RACISM, AND IT WAS AN UGLY SIGHT. BUT IT WAS NOT GOING TO DESTROY ME. — LOUIS GOSSETT JR.
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.
A statement from the family said Gossett died Friday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. No cause of death was revealed.
Gossett broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in the groundbreaking 1977 TV miniseries Roots. He 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. He also won a Golden Globe for the same role.
“More than anything, it was a huge affirmation of my position as a Black actor,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, An Actor and a Gentleman.
He earned his first acting credit in his Brooklyn high school’s production of You Can’t Take It with You while sidelined from the basketball team with an injury.
“I was hooked — and so was my audience,” he wrote in his memoir.
In 1959, Gossett received critical acclaim for his role in the Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun, and went on to become a star on Broadway.
He went to Hollywood for the first time in 1961, staying in a cockroachinfested motel that was one of the few places to allow Black people.
In 1968, he returned and this time, he was booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Universal Studios had rented him a convertible. Driving back to the hotel, he was stopped by eight sheriff’s officers, who called the car rental before letting him go.
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped by a police officer, who told him he broke a law prohibiting walking around residential Beverly Hills after 9 p.m. Two other officers arrived and Gossett said he was chained to a tree and handcuffed for three hours.
“I had come face-to-face with racism, and it was an ugly sight,” he wrote. “But it was not going to destroy me.”
He founded the Eracism Foundation to help create a world where racism doesn’t exist.
Gossett struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction for years after his Oscar win.
In 2010, he announced he had prostate cancer. In 2020, he was hospitalized with COVID-19. He is survived by two sons.