Louis Gossett Jr., first black man to win an Oscar for a supporting actor and to win an Emmy for his role in a groundbreaking film TV mini-series “Roots”, died. He was 87 years old.
Gossett’s cousin, Neal L. Gossett, told The Associated Press that the actor died in Santa Monica, California. A family statement said Gossett died Friday morning. No cause of death has been revealed.
Gossett’s cousin remembered the man he was walking with Nelson Mandela and who was also a great storyteller, a relative who faced and fought racism with dignity and humor.
“Never mind the awards, never mind the glitz and glamour, Rolls-Royces and big houses in Malibu. It’s about the humanity of the people he represented,” his cousin said.
Louis Gossett always thought of his early career as a reverse Cinderella story in which he managed to find him from an early age and push him forward towards his Academy Award for “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Gossett broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots, which depicted the atrocities of slavery in TV. The wide cast included Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton and John Amos.
In 1983, Gossett became the third black person to be nominated for an Academy Award in the supporting actor category. He won it for his role as a formidable Marine drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” with Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won an A Golden Globe for the same role.
“Above all, it was a tremendous validation of my position as a black actor,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Actor and a Gentleman.”
He first gained acting recognition in a Brooklyn high school production of “You Can’t Take It with You” when he was sidelined from the basketball team due to an injury.
“I was addicted – and so was my audience,” he wrote in his memoirs.
His English teacher encouraged him to go to Manhattan and try his hand at “Take a Giant Step.” He got the role and made his Broadway debut in 1953 at the age of 16.
“I didn’t know enough to be nervous,” Gossett wrote. “Looking back, I should have been scared to death walking onto that stage, but I wasn’t.”
Gossett attended New York University on a basketball and theater scholarship. He soon began acting and singing on television shows hosted by David Susskind, Ed Sullivan, Red Buttons, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar and Steve Allen.
Gossett became friends with James Dean and studied acting with Marilyn Monroe, Martin Landau and Steve McQueen at Frank Silvera’s Actors Studio.
In 1959, Gossett gained critical acclaim for his performance in the Broadway show “A Raisin in the Sun” along with Sidney Poitier,Ruby Dee and Diana Sands.
He later became a star on Broadway, replacing Billy Daniels in “Golden Boy” with Sammy Davis Jr. in 1964.
Gossett first went to Hollywood in 1961 to shoot the film version of A Raisin in the Sun. He had bitter memories of that trip, of staying in a motel full of cockroaches that was one of the few places where Black people were allowed.
In 1968, he returned to Hollywood to star in Nightmare Companions, NBC’s first made-for-television film, starring Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter and Patrick O’Neal.
This time, Gossett had a reservation at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Universal Studios rented him a convertible. While returning to his hotel after picking up his car, he was stopped by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s officer who ordered him to turn down the radio and raise the roof of the car before letting him go.
Within minutes, he was detained by eight sheriff’s officers, who leaned him against a car and forced him to open the trunk while they called the car rental agency, then released him.
“Although I understood that I had no alternative but to endure this abuse, it was terrible treatment and a humiliating feeling,” Gossett wrote in his memoirs. “I realized it was because I was black and I was showing off a luxury car that they thought I had no right to drive.”
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped a block away by a police officer who told him he had broken a law against walking in residential areas of Beverly Hills after 9 p.m. Two other officers arrived and Gossett said he was chained to a tree and handcuffed for three hours. He was finally freed when the original police car returned.
“Now I came face to face with racism and it was a terrible sight,” he wrote. – But it wasn’t supposed to destroy me.
In the late 1990s, Gossett said he was stopped by police on the Pacific Coast Highway while driving a restored 1986 Rolls Royce Corniche II. The officer told him he looked like the person they were looking for, but he recognized Gossett and left.
He founded the Eracism Foundation to help create a world where racism does not exist.
Gossett guest-starred on shows including “Bonanza,” “The (*87*) Files,” “The Mod Squad,” “McCloud” and the memorable Richard Pryor in “The Partridge Family”.
In August 1969, Gossett was partying with members of the Mamas and the Papas when they were invited to the home of actress Sharon Tate. First he went home to take a shower and change his clothes. As he was preparing to leave, he heard the news of Tate’s murder on television. She and others were killed by Charles Manson’s associates tonight.
“There had to be a reason I escaped the bullet,” he wrote.
Louis Cameron Gossett was born on May 27, 1936, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, the son of Louis Sr., a porter, and Hellen, a nurse. Later added Jr. to his name to honor his father.
“The Oscar gave me the opportunity to select good roles in movies like ‘Deep Mine,’ ‘Sadat’ and ‘The Iron Eagle,'” Gossett said in Dave Karger’s 2024 book “50 Oscar Nights.”
He said his statue was in storage.
“I’ll give it to the library so I do not have to look out for it,” he wrote in the book. – I need to get away from this.
Gossett appeared in such television films as “The Satchel Paige Story,” “Behind the Scenes of the White House,” “The Josephine Baker Story,” for which he won another Golden Globe, and “Back to the Basics.”
However, he said that winning the Oscar did not change the fact that all his roles were supporting roles.
In it, he played a fierce patriarch Remake of “The Color Purple” from 2023.
After winning the Oscar, Gossett struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction for years. He entered rehab, where he was diagnosed with toxic mold syndrome, which he attributed to his Malibu home.
In 2010, Gossett announced that he had prostate cancer, which he believed was detected at an early stage. In 2020, he was hospitalized due to Covid-19.
They also leave behind sons Satie, a producer and director from his second marriage, and Sharron, a chef he adopted after watching the 7-year-old on a TV show about children in desperate situations. He is his first cousin actor Robert Gossett.
Gossett’s first marriage to Hattie Glascoe was annulled. His second relationship, with Christina Mangosing, led to divorce in 1975, as did his third, with actress Cyndi James-Reese, in 1992.
