At the age of 87, Louis Gossett Jr supporting actor, passes away.
Never mind the lavish homes in Malibu and the Rolls-Royces; never mind the accolades. His cousin stated, “It’s about the humanity of the people that he stood for.”
Louis Gossett,
For Louis Gossett, success came to him early in life and drove him towards his Academy Award for “An Officer and a Gentleman.” He saw his early career as a reverse Cinderella story.
1961 marked Gossett’s first trip to Hollywood, where he worked on “A Raisin in the Sun.” He remembered the trip with bitterness, staying in one of the few Black people’s only accommodations, a cockroach-infested motel.
The birthplace of Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. is Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. After deciding to take acting classes due to a sports injury, he made his stage debut at the age of 17 in a school production of “You Can’t Take It With You.” While growing, he also battled polio. Despite being offered an athletic scholarship, the tall young man chose to pursue theatrical endeavours instead of playing varsity basketball at NYU on his own dime.
Despite having no professional training, Gossett made his Broadway debut in 1953 when he took Bill Gunn’s place as Spencer Scott in “Take a Giant Step,” which was voted one of the top ten shows of the year by the drama critics of the New York Times. For his performance in the play, he received his first Variety mention.
His other Broadway credits are from the iconic original 1959–1960 production of ‘A Raisin in the Sun’, where he portrayed George Murchison, the well-educated and affluent boyfriend of Beneatha, the daughter of the Younger family. George, who rejects his African origins, is a symbol of the fully assimilation of Black people.
When Gossett returned to the part for the 1961 motion picture adaptation of “A Raisin in the Sun,” it was his big-screen debut. (Previously, he played a bit part in the original comedy “The Desk Set,” which coincidentally was also a huge hit.)
Gossett played the Mephistophlean boxing promoter Eddie Satin in the contentious hit musical “Golden Boy,” starring Sammy Davis Jr., and he made his stage debut in the Langston Hughes adaptation “Tambourines to Glory” in 1963. In the original musical “The Zulu and the Zayda,” which told the story of a Black man and a Jew who bridged racial divide in Johannesburg, he was also one of the stars.
He made a big comeback to Hollywood in 1968 when he starred in NBC’s first made-for-TV film, “Companions in Nightmare,” alongside Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter, and Patrick O’Neal.
This time, Gossett had a reservation at the Beverly Hills Hotel and a convertible rented from Universal Studios. After picking up the car, he drove back to the hotel and was stopped by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s officer, who told him to put up the car’s roof and turn down the radio before he could leave.
He was stopped by eight sheriff’s officers in a matter of minutes; they made him lean against the car and open the trunk while they called the car rental company before releasing him.
“My system experienced an issue. You know, you have to be cautious and look over. Because I was damaged by that feeling,” Gossett recalled the 2020 incident. “So what does it mean that Black lives matter? Because they harmed themselves in addition to me, all lives are important.
He went for a walk after dinner at the hotel and was stopped by a policeman a block away, who informed him that he had broken a law that forbade him from walking through residential Beverly Hills after 9 p.m. Gossett claimed he had been handcuffed and chained to a tree for three hours when two more cops showed up.
Eventually, the original police car came back, and he was set free.As Fiddler in the ground-breaking 1977 miniseries “Roots,” which portrayed the horrors of slavery on TV, Gossett made his breakthrough on the small screen. John Amos, LeVar Burton, and Ben Vereen were among the large cast members.
In 1983, Gossett was nominated for a third Black Oscar in the supporting actor category. Serving as the formidable Marine drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” alongside Richard Gere and Debra Winger, he took home the award for that role. For the same role, he was also awarded a Golden Globe.
“An Actor and a Gentleman,” his memoir from 2010, stated, “was a huge affirmation of my position as a Black actor more than anything else.”
READ MORE: Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner: A Heartwarming Tale of True Friendship