Yaphet Kotto obituary
In the 1985 TV movie Badge of the Assassin, Yaphet Kotto, who has died aged 81, is told by Alex Rocco, playing an NYPD detective, that the only reason he has been assigned to the investigation of a black militant murder of two cops is because he is a black detective. As Rocco storms away, Kotto calls out to him: “Who told you I was a black detective?”
This could be a metaphor for Kotto’s career. His considerable acting talent was often subsumed by his appearance, almost the antithesis of what a Hollywood leading man, especially a black one, needed to be in that era. Tall and strongly built, Kotto was not a handsome Sidney Poitier, the breakthrough black actor of the 1960s. “I’m always called powerful, bulky or imposing … I think I have this image as a monster,” Kotto said, but his distinctive broad face, with sleepy eyes, quick smile and a slight lisp, was a character actor’s dream, a tool he manipulated through violence and sensitivity to bring subtleties to even the least subtle of roles.
He may be best remembered for doing just that in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) – in which he played the African ruler Dr Kananga and his gangster alter ego, Mr Big, making subtlety even more difficult (“I was too afraid of coming off like Mantan Moreland,” he said, referring to the vaudevillian known for his exaggerated facial expressions) – and in Midnight Run (1988), as the FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, whose chase for his lost ID card drives the plot. His finest film was Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978), a landmark study of both race and class in the US, which would have lost its power had Schrader cast matinee idols instead of Kotto, Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor.
Kotto’s Bond role may have drawn on his Emmy-nominated performance as the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe (1976), while his memorable Parker in Alien (1979) echoed Blue Collar when he and Harry Dean Stanton threaten to strike. Sadly, when Kotto became the first black actor to play Othello in a feature film, it was in Liz White’s little-seen 1980 version.
Kotto was born in New York City. His mother, Gladys Marie, was a nurse of Antiguan and Panamanian background; his father was, in Kotto’s telling, a businessman, Njoki Manga Bell, descended from Cameroonian royalty, who jumped ship in the US and changed his name to Avraham Kotto. His father adopted Judaism, as did his mother, a former Roman Catholic. From the age of three, after his parents divorced, Kotto was raised in the Bronx by his maternal grandparents, though he retained his Jewish identity.
Kotto’s life changed at 16 when he saw Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. He “knew from that moment I wanted to be an actor”. He enrolled in a local theatre school and made his stage debut as Othello at 19. His first film role was uncredited in Four for Texas (1963); his first credit came in the 1964 civil rights drama Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln and Julius Harris, who 24 years later played Kotto’s henchman Tee Hee in Live and Let Die.
But he concentrated on the stage: in 1965 he played on Broadway in The Zulu and the Zayda, and the actor Judy Holliday became his mentor, which led to his understudying and then replacing James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope. Kotto drew critical praise for his portrayal of the boxer Jack Jefferson (based on Jack Johnson).
After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Kotto released a record, Have You Ever Seen the Blues, reading his own words over what Billboard called “an infectious dance beat”. His film career expanded and in 1972 he played the title role in Larry Cohen’s Bone, a black comedy American Bmovie take on Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. He was Anthony Quinn’s police foil in Across 110th Street, and played the villain Harvard Blue in Jonathan Kaplan’s Truck Turner, with Isaac Hayes as the eponymous Shaft manqué.
By the 1980s his jobbing work was interspersed with occasional meatier roles, as in Peter Hyams’ The Star Chamber (1983) and alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man (1987), but he turned down a part in the civil war drama Glory (1989), saying the movie was about the white man commanding a regiment of black soldiers. “Do you see me taking orders like that?” he asked, though Denzel Washington won an Oscar rebelling against orders in the film. He also turned down Billy Dee Williams’ Star Wars role as Lando Calrissian and Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
But his career revived with one of his greatest roles. In the longrunning (1993-99) TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, he played the shift commander Lt Al Giardello, whose background, described by the show’s creator, David Simon, as “the unlikeliest Sicilian”, was never explained, simply taken for granted. After a Homicide movie in 2000, Kotto’s only other film role was reprising his Midnight Run character in the aptly titled Witless Protection (2008).
By that time Kotto had moved to Manila with his Filipino third wife, Tessie Sinahon, with whom he ran an artists’ retreat in southern Leyte. Both earlier marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Tessie, by a daughter, Natasha, and two sons, Fred and Robert, from his first marriage, to Rita Ingrid Dittman, and three daughters, Sarada, Mirabai and Salina, from his second, to Antoinette Pettyjohn.
• Yaphet Frederick Kotto, actor, born 15 November 1939; died 15 March 2021