The great Louis Gossett Jr. has passed. He was 87 years old. He passed away in a rehabilitation center in Santa Monica, CA.
Some of you may recall first seeing Louis Gossett in the 1977 adaptation of Roots, he played the role of Fiddler. He won an Emmy for his work.
I’m certain others recall him in film depicted atop this quickly penned piece. The tough no-nonsense drill instructor in the 1982 film an Officer and a Gentleman. He won the best supporting actor for that fierce performance. Louis was the first black man to do so.
Neither of these fine pieces of acting were the start to his long and varied career. For that you would have to reach back much farther than you might think. To 1953 in fact. It was his Broadway debut, in Take a Giant Step. He was all of 17, still in high school. Louis Gossett Jr. had not received any formal training beforehand.
He was a natural it seems.
The list of his subsequent work on IMDB runs, naturally, long. It encompasses his appearances on screens large and small from 1957 till 2023.
Acting, at which he was enormously gifted, did not encompass all his life’s work.
Louis Gossett Jr. was long an activist for social justice causes, he began the Eracism Foundation with the aim of eradicating racism. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning he recounted some of his life experiences with racism — such as being pulled over when aged 23 (1966) under suspicion of car theft because he was driving a nice, new, Ford Fairlane 500. He had been given the car to drive after netting a pay day in a TV production after being cast for a lead role in A Raisin in The Sun.
He was only released after being handcuffed to a tree for three hours.
Better days were to come though.
His first film credit was in The Bushbaby (1969). He rarely had a year thereafter in which he did not appear on the big screen, all while maintaining a steady flow of TV work.
We’ll miss you Louis Gossett Jr. But you’ve left a great deal of good work behind for us to remember you by.
Thank you and RIP.