Yaphet Kotto, the African-American actor best known for memorable roles in Alien and in the 007 film Live and Let Die, as well as in the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, died at the age of 81 in the Philippines.
The news was announced in a Facebook post by Kotto’s wife, Tessie Sinahon, who wrote: “You played a villain in some of your films, but for me you are a true hero and for many people too. A good man, a good father, a good husband and a decent human being, very rare to meet … Rest in peace Baby, I will miss you every day, my best friend, my rock. I love you and you will always be in my heart. Until we see each other again! “The cause of death has not been reported.
Kotto said he was inspired to act by watching Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront as a teenager, and later by Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, released in 1958: “Right there on the screen was a tall black man and I said to myself: ‘ I could be like him. ‘ “
Kotto got an early role as a railway worker in Michael Roemer’s independent pioneer film, Nothing But a Man, from 1964, but the reluctance of American cinemas to show the film meant that it was not the breakthrough it should have been. A small role as a member of the theft team in Steve McQueen’s successful vehicle The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 gave him more visibility, as well as a high-impact supporting role in Hollywood veteran William Wyler’s latest film, The Liberation of LB Jones in 1970, in which Kotto’s character shoots a white policeman in a brutal act of revenge – according to Kotto, “No one had seen a black man kill a white man on the screen before that”. In 1969, Kotto also took on the lead role of boxer Jack Jefferson of James Earl Jones in the Broadway opening season of The Great White Hope, a rather fictional account of boxer Jack Johnson’s career.
Having proved his skill, Kotto landed his first leading role in Larry Cohen’s domestic invasion satire thriller Bone, in the directorial debut of the filmmaker who became a legend in the exploration film circuit. Kotto plays a thief who is mistaken for a handyman for a couple, and who is then summoned by his wife to kill her husband. He then played a straightforward policeman in pursuit of gangsters in the blaxploitation thriller Across 110th Street, before being cast as the main villain in Live and Let Die, the blaxploitation-influenced Bond film that marked Roger Moore’s first appearance as 007.
Live and Let Die, released in 1973, required Kotto to play two characters: Harlem crime lord Mr Big, who is actually the disguised alter ego of Dr. Kananga, the leader of the fictional Caribbean island of San Monique. Kotto saw the role as yet another pioneering effort, saying later: “Live and Let Die was the first time that you saw a black man playing James Bond. We had never seen a black man chase a white man through the screen. He was a hero! “
Subsequently, Kotto worked continuously: his best-known films include Truck Turner, another blaxploitation film in which he played a pimp trying to end bounty hunter Isaac Hayes; the success of TV Raid on Entebbe, for which his performance as Idi Amin was nominated for an Emmy Award; and Blue Collar, Paul Schrader’s directorial debut, in which Kotto plays one of three workers who come into conflict with corrupt union leaders.
Kotto was then cast for his most enduring role in cinema: as Parker, Nostromo’s chief engineer in space terror directed by Ridley Scott, Alien. Another groundbreaking role for a black actor, this time as a main character in a science fiction film, Kotto’s acting included his noble – and fruitless – self-sacrifice trying to save Lambert from Veronica Cartwright from a cruel xenomorph.
Anxious not to be typified, Kotto refused the role of Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, as well as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was first broadcast in 1987. Kotto lamented the latter, saying, “I I should have done that, but I left. When you’re making movies, you tend to say no to the TV. “
In the 1980s, his higher profile performances were supporting pieces in The Running Man, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s vehicle in which Kotto played a resistance fighter in a dystopian US future (set in 2017), and Midnight Run, as a FBI man. However, he agreed to assume a longtime role on TV, as Al Giardello, the commander of the avuncular station, in the police series Homicide: Life on the Street, set in Baltimore. Kotto appeared in all seven series of Homicide, which lasted from 1993 to 1999, as well as in the spin-off TV movie that revolves around an attempted assassination of Giardello.
Kotto effectively retired from cinema in the mid-1990s, although he had a final role in the 2008 crime comedy Witless Protection, starring Larry the Cable Guy. In 1999, he published his autobiography The Royalty: A Spiritual Awakening, in which he said that his father, Avraham Kotto, was a descendant of a royal Cameroonian clan and that he was a descendant of Edward VII. (The latter was denied by the Buckingham Palace press secretary.) Kotto also said that his father was a Jew and that he “instilled Judaism” in him.
Kotto was married three times: to Rita Dittman (1959-1976), Toni Pettyjohn (1975-1989) and Sinahon, whom he married in 1998; he had six children.