LOS ANGELES — Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal TV miniseries"Roots," has died. He was 87.
Louis Gossett always thought of his early career as a reverse Cinderella story, with success finding him from an early age and propelling him forward, toward his Academy Award for"An Officer and a Gentleman." "I knew too little to be nervous," Gossett wrote."In retrospect, I should have been scared to death as I walked onto that stage, but I wasn't."
He went on to become a star on Broadway, replacing Billy Daniels in"Golden Boy" with Sammy Davis Jr. in 1964.Gossett went to Hollywood for the first time in 1961 to make the film version of"A Raisin in the Sun." He had bitter memories of that trip, staying in a cockroach-infested motel that was one of the few places to allow Black people.
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped a block away by a police officer, who told him he broke a law prohibiting walking around residential Beverly Hills after 9 p.m. Two other officers arrived and Gossett said he was chained to a tree and handcuffed for three hours. He was eventually freed when the original police car returned.