His first film role was uncredited in Four for Texas (1963) his first credit came in the 1964 civil rights drama Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln and Julius Harris, who 24 years later played Kotto’s henchman Tee Hee in Live and Let Die.īut he concentrated on the stage: in 1965 he played on Broadway in The Zulu and the Zayda, and the actor Judy Holliday became his mentor, which led to his understudying and then replacing James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope. He enrolled in a local theatre school and made his stage debut as Othello at 19. He “knew from that moment I wanted to be an actor”. Kotto’s life changed at 16 when he saw Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. From the age of three, after his parents divorced, Kotto was raised in the Bronx by his maternal grandparents, though he retained his Jewish identity. His father adopted Judaism, as did his mother, a former Roman Catholic. His mother, Gladys Marie, was a nurse of Antiguan and Panamanian background his father was, in Kotto’s telling, a businessman, Njoki Manga Bell, descended from Cameroonian royalty, who jumped ship in the US and changed his name to Avraham Kotto. Sadly, when Kotto became the first black actor to play Othello in a feature film, it was in Liz White’s little-seen 1980 version. Kotto’s Bond role may have influenced his Emmy-nominated performance as the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe (1976), while his memorable Parker in Alien (1979) echoed Blue Collar when he and Harry Dean Stanton threaten to strike. “I’m always called powerful, bulky or imposing … I think I have this image as a monster,” Kotto said, but his distinctive broad face, with sleepy eyes, quick smile and a slight lisp, was a character actor’s dream, a tool he manipulated through violence and sensitivity to bring subtleties to even the least subtle of roles. Tall and strongly built, Kotto was not a handsome Sidney Poitier, the breakthrough black actor of the 1960s. His considerable acting talent was often subsumed by his appearance, almost the antithesis of what a Hollywood leading man, especially a black one, needed to be in that era. This could be a metaphor for Kotto’s career. As Rocco storms away, Kotto calls out to him: “Who told you I was a black detective?” In the 1985 TV movie Badge of the Assassin, Yaphet Kotto, who has died aged 81, is told by Alex Rocco, playing an NYPD detective, that the only reason he has been assigned to the investigation of a black militant murder of two cops is because he is a black detective.
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