OSCAR winner Louis Gossett Jr. has died. He was 87 years old.
This was the first time a black man won an academy award. He won it for his supporting role in An Officer and a Gentleman in 1983.
People all over the world knew him after he won an Emmy in 1977 for his role in the famous TV miniseries Roots.
The star’s nephew told the Associated Press on Friday that he died in Santa Monica, California, but he didn’t say anything else.
The cause of death has not been made public.
BORN A STAR
On May 27, 1936, Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
His dad worked as a porter and his mom as a nurse.
After getting hurt while playing basketball, Gossett turned his energy and skills from the court to the stage at a young age.
In his memoir An Actor and a Gentleman, which came out in 2010, he wrote, “I was hooked, and so was my audience.”
In high school, he played his first role in the play You Can’t Take It with You. By the time he was 16, he had landed his first role on Broadway in Take a Giant Step.
“I didn’t know enough to be scared,” Gossett wrote. “Looking back, I should have been scared to death when I walked out on that stage, but I wasn’t.”
Later, Gossett got a scholarship to go to New York University for both basketball and acting. There, he quickly made friends with people like Marylin Monroe, Ed Sullivan, and James Dean.
By 1964, he had a regular part in Broadway’s Golden Boy, taking over for Billy Daniels.
IMPOSSIBLE
During his career in Hollywood, Gossett had a lot of problems with racism. He wrote about some of those problems in his memoir.
When Gossett first went to California in 1961 to film A Raisin in the Sun, he said he stayed in a dirty motel full of cockroaches because it was the only place that would let Black people stay.
It was nice for him to stay in a fancy hotel and have a convertible to drive around town when he got back to Hollywood to star in NBC’s Companions in Nightmare.
But the police stopped him twice on the road. The first time, they told him to turn down the radio and raise the convertible top. The second time, they searched his car and called the rental company to check his papers.
“Even though I knew I had to put up with this abuse, it was awful to be treated that way and made me feel ashamed,” Gossett wrote.
“I knew this was happening because I was black and showing off with a fancy car that they thought I had no right to be driving.”
After 9 p.m., Gossett said he was stopped by police again while on that same trip in 1968 and told it was illegal to walk around Beverly Hills.
The police officer caught the star and tied him to a tree for three hours.
He wrote, “Now I had seen racism for what it was—an ugly sight—but it wasn’t going to destroy me.”
In the end, Gossett started the Eracism Foundation to help projects around the world that are trying to end racism.
IN LATER YEARS
Throughout his life, Gossett kept getting roles in hit movies like “The Josephine Baker Story” and “The Color Purple,” but he also had problems with drugs.
He said he had problems with drugs and alcohol after winning the Oscar. He ended up going to rehab and was later diagnosed with toxic mold syndrome.
In 2010, the actor told his fans that he had been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer. In 2020, he got COVID.
He was married three times, with his last marriage ending in 1992 with Cyndi Hames-Reese.
His two sons, Satie and Sharron, survive him. Sharron was adopted by Gossett when he was seven years old.
