The actor who played wise older mentors

Playing tough but decent men came naturally to Louis Gossett Jr. A born athlete who stood 6-foot-4, the actor radiated both an intimidating physicality and an open heart. That combination was on full display in 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman, in which his hard-nosed Marine drill instructor Emil Foley pushed Richard Gere’s troubled young officer candidate beyond his limits. The role made Gossett—already an Emmy winner for an earlier mentor role in the 1977 miniseries Roots—the first Black performer to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. But he was never unaware of Hollywood’s pervasive racism. “I had to act as if I was second class,” he said in 2008. “The only time I was really free was when the director said ‘action,’ and that’s when I flew.”

Born in Brooklyn to a porter father and a nurse mother, Gossett turned to acting as a teenager, when an injury temporarily sidelined him from basketball. A drama teacher encouraged him to try out for a Broadway play, and he landed the lead at age 17. He then attended New York University on a basketball scholarship but was back on stage before graduation, realizing that “acting was paying him more than any basketball team would,” said The New York Times. A regular on Broadway in the ’60s, he also sang folk music in coffee shops. His film debut came in 1961, with A Raisin in the Sun.

While Gossett appeared in dozens of other films after his Oscar win, he wasn’t offered quality roles, and he “turned to cocaine and alcohol to numb his disappointment,” said the Los Angeles Times. Yet he took seriously his status as a role model, winning two NAACP Image Awards and founding the Eracism Foundation to fight racism through art. “The arts can achieve it overnight,” he said in 2018. “Millions of people are watching. We can get to them quicker than anybody.”