Early in his productive life, the actor Louis Cameron Gossett Jr., then a teenager, received a blessing and a sort of dressing down from his grandmother that guided him for the rest of his life. “Let me tell you something,” she told him. “God was here before you got here. He is going to be here while you are here. And He is going to be here long after you’re gone. So you might as well calm down and let Him handle things now.”
Gossett said, “I had never forgotten those wise words, which had taken me down a notch or two that night. When Bertha wagged what was left of a finger at you, she might as well have been Sergeant Emil Foley, whom I was to play years later in ‘An Officer and a Gentleman.’” Gossett was the first African American male to win an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, for that role in 1982 in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
This is just a sample of his grandmother’s wisdom that Gossett quoted from his autobiography (2010) “An Actor and a Gentleman,” with Phyllis Karas, where he recounts his coming of age in New York City and his early years on the stage. As the world knows now, Gossett died on March 29 in Santa Monica, Calif., according to his nephew, Neal Gossett. He was 87 and no cause was given for his death.
Born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, on May 27, 1938, Gossett contracted polio as a youth and this confinement led him to become a compulsive reader. He made his stage debut at 17 and gained notice for his performance in “Take a Giant Step,” and in rapid succession, those steps would include “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959); “The Blacks” (1961); and “Tambourines to Glory” (1963).
“Thanks to my role in ‘Take a Giant Step,’ I’d been making more money than any other Black man in our Brooklyn neighborhood,” he wrote in his book. “Dressed in my Thom McAn shoes and my Robert Hall suit, I spent way too much time strutting down the streets, a girl on each arm, reveling in my newfound position as the center of attention.” It was this behavior that earned him the chastisement from his grandmother.
In 1968, Gossett flew to Hollywood for NBC’s first-made-for-TV movie. “I was coming back as one of the top clients for the William Morris Talent Agency,” he recalled. It was a bright and promising period for Gossett, thanks to such notables as Marilyn Monroe, and Steve McQueen, whom he knew and studied with.
“I’d learned during those seven years that the only way I could afford my true loves—Broadway, off-Broadway, and summer stock—would be to shuttle back and forth from the East to the West Coast for episodic TV, which could pay a minimum of $2,500 per episode. The time was now right for me to begin this lifestyle, and the show for which I had come to Hollywood was ‘Companions in Nightmare.’ The first NBC Movie of the Week, ‘Companions’ was paying even more than the minimum, more money than I had ever seen as an actor,” he wrote.
He received another jolt of celebrity in 1977 for playing Fiddler in the “Roots” miniseries and won Outstanding Lead Actor for a Single Appearance in a Drama or Comedy Series at the Emmy Awards.
“Reading the script for the first time, I was envious of the roles of the other actors, including O.J. Simpson, who appeared in the first hour of the week-long series,” he related. “I mistakenly believed that the modern audience would see my character of Fiddler as an Uncle Tom. Yet Fiddler was old enough to know the difference, to understand what it took to stay alive in his world, and how to teach the others, including Kunta Kinte, how to behave. In the first scene, I tell him, ‘You in America now. You no more in Africa.’ And in so many ways, that is what I have been, an African American, acting properly respectful of his white employers and fellow actors. Too often, I was the only black in the white crowd, dressed in my tuxedo, clean and educated, teaching others to be properly respectful and to understand that this was the only way to survive in a white man’s world.”
Throughout his book, Gossett relays several encounters with the police, (including being handcuffed to a tree for three hours by the police in 1966), the microaggressions of white folks, and how he dealt with them. “One day, as I was out walking, I happened to notice a T-shirt being hawked at a corner near my house. ‘E.ra.cism,’ it spelled out, separating the letters in dictionary format, ‘the removal of the existence of the belief that one race is superior to another.’ I thought hard about the word eracism. I had seen it before in New Orleans and considered what a monumental task it would be to make that word a reality. Racism is even internal, within each race, reflected in black-on-black crime, and white-on-white crime. It is not as if a person can simply wake up one day and say, ‘Today, I am no longer a racist.’ Racism is a disease, not unlike alcoholism or overeating. It takes deep introspection and self-examination to even begin to make the first step toward erasing it. I had to start with myself, to meditate and identify and erase any forms of racism to which I clung. The name ‘Eracism’ was the easy part, but its goal was lofty and overreaching. Entire nations and the greatest minds had made little progress in erasing racism. Even the great historian W. E. B. Du Bois had said that the main problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of race. But then again, I had arrived at a place where I now believed that nothing is impossible.”
After “Roots,” Gossett was still in demand, although he noted there was a decline in roles for Black performers. His roles in “Sadat” (1983); “Touched by an Angel” (1997), and “Watchmen” (2019) are highlights of his impressive résumé, to say nothing of the numerous awards.
Gossett was married three times, fathered one son, and adopted another. His wives were Hattie Glascoe, Christine Mangosing, and Cyndi James-Reese.
At the end of his book, he wrote: “My phone continues to ring. Never have I felt so full of energy, and so determined to accomplish my goals. There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not grateful for all I have been able to accomplish in my life. Even though I might have faltered along the way, I do not look back but rather focus on today. To know that somehow I managed to help a child lead a better life would be the greatest reward I could ever imagine. To erase racism from the lives of these children, I fully realize, will be a gargantuan task. But for an exemplary black man who fell down and then learned how to stand up even taller than a marine drill sergeant, it is within reach.”