Yaphet Kotto, star of Live and Let Die and Alien, dies aged 81
Source: The Guardian
The actor, who played the lead villain in the 1973 Bond film, also starred in hit TV series Homicide: Life on the Street
Yaphet Kotto, the African-American actor best known for memorable roles in Alien and the 007 film Live and Let Die, as well as the hit TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, has died aged 81 in the Philippines.
The news was announced in a Facebook post by Kotto’s wife Tessie Sinahon, who wrote: “You played a villain on some of your movies but for me you’re a real hero and to a lot of people also. A good man, a good father, a good husband and a decent human being, very rare to find … Rest in Peace Honey, I’m gonna miss you everyday, my best friend, my rock. I love you and you will always be in my heart. Till we meet again!” The cause of death was not given.
Kotto said he was inspired to go into acting by watching Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront as a teenager, and later by Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, which was released in 1958: “Standing right there on the screen was this tall black man and I said to myself, ‘I could be like him.’”
Kotto scored an early role as a railroad worker in Michael Roemer’s pioneering 1964 independent Nothing But a Man, but US cinemas’ reluctance to screen the film meant it was not the breakthrough it should have been. A small role as one of the heist crew in the successful Steve McQueen vehicle The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 gave him more visibility, as did a high-impact supporting role in Hollywood veteran William Wyler’s final film, The Liberation of LB Jones in 1970, in which Kotto’s character shoots a white policeman dead in a brutal act of revenge – according to Kotto, “No one had seen a black man kill a white man onscreen prior to that”. In 1969 Kotto had also taken over the lead role of boxer Jack Jefferson from James Earl Jones in the opening Broadway run of The Great White Hope, a thinly fictionalised account of the career of boxer Jack Johnson.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/16/yaphet-kotto-star-of-live-and-let-die-and-alien-dies-aged-81?utm_term=727cddbd49017a7721da0498a27bf4ce&utm_campaign=FilmToday&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=filmtoday_email
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He was larger than life.
