Louis Gossett Jr. dies: ‘The Officer and the Gentleman’ star breaks barriers in Hollywood

Lou Gossett Jr. was still a teenager, fresh off a successful Broadway career, when he landed at Los Angeles Airport and headed to Beverly Hills in a cherry red Ford Fairlane, feeling on top of the world.

He didn’t get far before police stopped him, saying he matched the description of someone they were looking for. A few miles later, it happened again. Then again. By the time he arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a squad car had rolled over and officers had handcuffed Gossett to a tree while trying to figure out what a young black man was doing in the city.

“Welcome to Hollywood,” the Oscar-winning actor wrote years later in his memoir, “An Actor and a Gentleman,” recounting his inaugural trip to Los Angeles in 1967. “Welcome to reality.”

For Gossett, it was just another painful reminder that as a black actor, no matter the awards, no matter the acclaim, the barriers will always be high, the odds always long.

“I had to act like I was second-rate,” he told The Times in 2008. “I had to compose myself. The only time I was truly free was when the director said the word ‘action’ in front of the camera or on stage, and that’s when I flew.”

Gossett, remembered for his career-defining roles in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and the influential TV series “Roots,” died Thursday night in Santa Monica. His nephew told the Associated Press. The cause of death was not revealed. He was 87 years old.

Just like Jesse Jackson or Andrew Young’s lifelong dedication to the civil rights movement, Gossett has been present at many defining moments of black theater, film, and television over the past half-century.

He appeared with Sidney Poitier in “A Raisin in the Sun” in 1961, when racial stereotypes in movies were still at their peak. He won an Emmy Award as a slave named Fiddler on “Roots” in 1977, when ABC was concerned about whether the series should be set in the Deep South. When an Oscar for his role as a steely, serious drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman” failed to open the spigot for more significant roles, Gossett masked his anger with drugs and alcohol and then saved himself with activism. .

Lewis Cameron Gossett Jr. was born on May 27, 1936, and grew up in Sheepshead Bay, New York, near Coney Island. His mother, Helen, was a nurse and his father, Louis Sr., was a porter. He aspired to be a basketball player, but thought it might be better to study medicine, partly so his mother could proudly introduce him as “my son, the doctor.”

At 17, his high school English teacher pulled Gossett aside and told him a theater company was looking for a young black actor. With little to no acting experience, Gossett auditioned for and won the role in “Take a Giant Step,” a coming-of-age story that opened on Broadway.

“I knew nothing about acting,” he told NPR in 2010. “I had never seen a play before.”

As a point guard, Gossett tried out for the New York Knicks while a student at NYU, but put basketball and school aside when acting roles kept rotating. By the time he was 23, he was starring alongside Poitier in A Raisin. In the Sun”, first on Broadway and then in film. He also appeared opposite James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson in The Blacks, an Off-Broadway production with an all-black cast that ran for 1,408 performances.

But by the late 1960s, he was living in Los Angeles and struggling to find work. He turned to songwriting and handed one of his songs, “Handsome Johnny,” to musician Richie Havens, who recorded the anti-war song for his 1966 album “Mixed Bag,” and later performed it at Woodstock. The song ended up saving him from eviction, as a property check for $11,750 arrived just as the movers were preparing to move his furniture, Gossett said.

“Roots,” the sweeping story of a black family’s struggles from enslavement to post-Civil War life, changed careers and attitudes in Hollywood with its success and powerful story. However, to Gossett, it seemed all too familiar.

“I grew up as an only child, but I also grew up with 25 or 30 cousins,” he told The Times in 1996. “My grandparents and aunts took care of all the kids when our parents worked, and in the summer, we took care of all the kids.” They will all be shipped south to farms in South Carolina or Georgia.

Gossett knew as soon as he saw the script that playing military official Emile Foley in the 1982 film “An Officer and a Gentleman” was a special opportunity. While Richard Gere, Debra Winger and the other stars remained in Port Townsend on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Gossett hid out with a group of Marines miles away from the filming location.

“They put steel up my ass, even when I walk on set and shout, ‘Get down and give me 50’ to the actors, and, by God, they will do it.”

The performance earned Gossett a Supporting Actor Oscar, making him the first black actor to win the category. Hattie McDaniel was the first black actress to win an Academy Award when she took home the supporting actress award in 1940 for her role in Gone with the Wind. Poitier was the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film “Lilies of the Field” in 1964.

Gossett believed the award would cement him as a leading actor just as it had done for his idol Poitier. He asked his agent to look for opportunities to play prosecutors, doctors, police chiefs and concerned family fathers. “Anything but those stereotypes are for black actors,” he said during an interview with the Television Academy Foundation.

He was exasperated when the plum roles failed to arrive, and he was forced to follow up “An Commander and a Gentleman” with a role in “Jaws 3-D,” the sequel to Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster.

He turned to cocaine and alcohol to numb his disappointment and watched his marriage crumble. After undergoing treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, Gossett immersed himself in work with inner-city charities and formed his own foundation, the Eracism Foundation, a Los Angeles-based non-profit dedicated to “removing from existence the belief that one race, one culture, and one people are better than others.” “

He did not stop working for a long time, as he appeared in the films “Enemy Mine” with Dennis Quaid in 1985, “Iron Eagle” in 1986, “Toy Soldiers” in 1991, “Diggstown” in 1992, and “A Good Man in Africa” ​​in 1994. “Left Behind: The World at War” in 2005, among many films. Even at the age of eighty, he had six films in production. In all, he has appeared in more than 200 films and TV shows, most recently in last year’s version of “The Color Purple.”

Gossett lamented that, during the long history of cinema, more films had not been made about African American roots.

“Everyone knows about the Romans, Greeks, Vikings and Britons,” he told The Washington Post in 2016. “But there is another culture that is very rich: African culture.”

He said that if there was such a cinematic opportunity, he would jump at the chance to portray Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with a group of soldiers and elephants to sack Rome during the Second Punic War.

“We have to tell those stories. Being included in history is important, especially for African-American children,” he said. “They have to know whose shoulders they stand on.”

He was married and divorced three times, and has two children, Satie and Sharon.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.