Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal TV miniseries Roots, has died
Multi-award-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr has died aged 87.
Louis was famously the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the TV miniseries Roots. His nephew confirmed the news, revealing he’d passed away on Thursday in California, with a cause of death not yet confirmed. Louis, who scooped his Academy Award for An Officer and a Gentleman, earned his first acting credit in his Brooklyn high school’s production of You Can’t Take It with You while he was sidelined from the basketball team with an injury.
“I was hooked — and so was my audience,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir An Actor and a Gentleman. His English teacher urged him to go into Manhattan to try out for Take a Giant Step, in which he got the part and made his Broadway debut in 1953 aged 16. “I knew too little to be nervous,” Gossett wrote. “In retrospect, I should have been scared to death as I walked onto that stage, but I wasn’t.”
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He attended New York University on a basketball and drama scholarship. He was soon acting and singing on TV shows hosted by David Susskind, Ed Sullivan, Red Buttons and Merv Griffin. He went to Hollywood for the first time in 1961 to make the film version of A Raisin in the Sun. In 1968, he returned to Hollywood for a role in Companions in Nightmare, NBC’s first made-for-TV movie starring Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter and Patrick O’Neal.
Gossett broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in Roots, which depicted the atrocities of slavery on TV. The cast included Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton and John Amos. He became the third Black Oscar nominee in the supporting actor category in 1983. He won for his performance as the intimidating Marine drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman opposite Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won a Golden Globe for the same role.
“More than anything, it was a huge affirmation of my position as a Black actor,” he wrote in his memoir. “The Oscar gave me the ability of being able to choose good parts in movies like Enemy Mine, Sadat and Iron Eagle,” Gossett said in Dave Karger’s 2024 book 50 Oscar Nights. He also founded the Eracism Foundation to help create a world where racism doesn’t exist.
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He played an obstinate patriarch in the 2023 remake of “The Color Purple.” Gossett struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction for years after his Oscar win. He went to rehab, where he was diagnosed with toxic mold syndrome, which he attributed to his house in Malibu. In 2010, Gossett announced he had prostate cancer, which he said was caught in the early stages. In 2020, he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
He is survived by sons Satie, a producer-director from his second marriage, and Sharron, a chef whom he adopted after seeing the 7-year-old in a TV segment on children in desperate situations. His first cousin is actor Robert Gossett. Gossett’s first marriage to Hattie Glascoe was annulled. His second, to Christina Mangosing, ended in divorce in 1975 as did his third to actor Cyndi James-Reese in 1992.
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