Yaphet Kotto, an imposing actor who was descended from African royalty and was known for playing tough characters on a list of films like “Alien” and “Midnight Run”, died on Monday near Manila, Philippines. He was 81 years old.
His death was confirmed on Tuesday by his agent, Ryan Goldhar. His wife, Thessa Sinahon, announced in a Facebook post. No other details were immediately available.
Kotto started studying acting at the age of 16 at the Actors Mobile Theater Studio, according to Variety, and at the age of 19 he made his professional theater debut in “Othello”.
He often played cops, criminals and other hardened on-screen personalities. He received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of President Idi Amin, Uganda’s killer strongman, in the 1976 television film “Raid on Entebbe”.
He also starred as a police lieutenant in the 1990s TV hit “Homicide: Life on the Street”, a former inmate in the 1978 film “Blue Collar” and a prison officer in “Brubaker”, a 1980 film about a farm prison also starring Robert Redford.
He even played two Bond villains in the 1973 film “Live and Let Die”: a corrupt Caribbean dictator and, for a long time, the character of that character, a drug dealer named Mr. Big.
In 1993, Kotto, who was six feet tall, told The Baltimore Sun that these papers presented a distorted picture of what he really looked like.
“I want to try to play a much more sensitive man. A family man, ”he told the newspaper. “There is an aspect of black life that is not running or jumping.”
Yaphet Frederick Kotto was born on November 15, 1939 in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. Her father was of Cameroonian royalty, the Baltimore Sun reported. Her mother was a descendant of Panamanians and West Indians. The couple broke up when Mr. Kotto was a child, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents.
Mr. Kotto has been married three times; he and Mrs. Sinahon, who is from the Philippines, were married in Baltimore in 1998.
Mr. Kotto had six children. Information about their survivors was not immediately available.
One of Kotto’s early parts was a supporting role in the 1964 film “Nothing but a Man”, about a black couple facing discrimination in Deep South. He would have more than 90 other credits as an actor, in film, on television and on Broadway.
Notably, he played Parker, an engineer tasked with repairing a spacecraft in “Alien”, Ridley Scott’s 1979 blockbuster.
In the 1988 action comedy Midnight Run, co-starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, he played FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, whose stolen identity becomes food for a current joke. And in “The Running Man”, a dystopian 1987 thriller set in what was then the near future (2019), Kotto played a resistance fighter alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fascist version of America.