Louis Gossett Jr., 87, Dies; ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ and ‘Roots’ Actor
When he accepted the Oscar for best supporting actor in 1983, he was the first Black performer to win in that category — and only the third (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier) to win an Academy Award for acting.
Mr. Gossett, a versatile actor, played a range of parts in his long career. But he was best known for playing decent, plain-spoken men, often authority figures.
By the time he won his Oscar, he had already won an Emmy as Fiddler, the mentor of the lead character, Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton), in the blockbuster 1977 mini-series “Roots.”
Fiddler was, as the name suggested, a musician, an enslaved man on an 18th-century Virginia plantation. Mr. Gossett was not thrilled about the role at first. “Why choose me to play the Uncle Tom?” he remembered thinking in a 2018 Television Academy video interview. But he came to admire the survival skills of forebears like Fiddler, he said, and based the character on his grandparents and a great-grandmother.
