Louis Gossett Jr Actor who won an Oscar, but still had to fight black prejudice
Louis Gossett Jr, an actor who brought authority to hundreds of screen roles, winning an Oscar as a Marines drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman and an Emmy as a wise, older guide to the enslaved Kunta Kinte in the groundbreaking series Roots, has died aged 87.
In recent years, he had battled prostate cancer and a respiratory illness caused by toxic mould in his former home in Malibu, California.
In a career spanning seven decades, he became one of the most recognisable actors of his generation. With his shaved skull and the sinewy six-footthree physique of a college basketball player, he brimmed with magnetism.
In his drive to shatter boundaries as a black actor, he worked on Broadway from the 1950s and appeared in such dramas as Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Murderous Angels as ill-fated Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba.
He seemed poised for greater success after the Emmy for Roots (in 1977) and the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
An Officer and a Gentleman (1983), but despite his widely acknowledged range, he found himself largely excluded from prestigious and lucrative film roles.
“I thought I’d get a lot of offers and they didn’t come,” he told the New York Times in 1989. Several factors were at work, he later said. One was age: he was in his mid-40s, putting him at a competitive disadvantage when competing for leading parts, especially when people of colour had fewer opportunities in general.
Another, he said, was the difficulty of pursuing a career while raising a young son as a divorced single father.
The pressures became so great that he sank into depression and became addicted to cocaine and alcohol.
His reputation plummeted after an ex-wife alleged during a custody battle in 1982 that their son was spoon-fed “white powder” by his girlfriend. Criminal charges were dropped for lack of evidence, and he kept custody, but the damage was done.
In his memoir, he noted that white actors “were able to overcome worse predicaments with drugs and alcohol”.
“For them, there was hope of redemption and an even more successful career at the end of treatment, the drug problem only adding to the allure. But a black man was supposed to ‘mind his manners’, and drugs were a permanent blemish. For me, the road was too narrow to fool around.”
To pay the bills, he was reduced to supporting roles in low-rent action fare, as well as many direct-to-video movies. And his fallen stature felt like a constant reminder of the indignities he endured as a black man in Hollywood, starting with his first trip to LA in 1967 to make a TV movie.
He said police handcuffed him to a tree for three hours because he looked suspicious driving a luxury sports car and blasting Sam Cooke on the radio.
Gossett also played guitar and wrote with Richie Havens the antiwar song Handsome Johnny, which Havens played at Woodstock in 1969.
“That song kept me from being homeless. A landlord was putting me out when I got a residual cheque.”
He is survived by two sons.