Louis Gossett Jr. is DEAD TO ME

Loved him since An Officer and a Gentleman. RIP.

An he won back when being Black was a disadvantage!

He was fighting an oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico, he was 87!

Louish Goshet Junior

Love liftsh ush up were we belong!

Wait, waaaa-? Buffy Shainte-Marie ishn’t Shioux? She’s Shishillian?!

Hat Daddy aka Marshall Ashford from General Hospital is his first cousin.

Loved him in An Officer and a Gentleman

So long, Fiddler -

OP is a cunt.

He got a nice, juicy late career role in HBO's Watchmen a couple years back.

Also, reportedly casting for Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs came down to Gossett and Hopkins. Demme obviously went with the latter. Interesting to think what the movie would have been if they'd gone the other way.

This one makes me sad. Such a great actor. RIP.

The cartoonist for the New Yorker Roz Chast knew him because he was a pupil of Roz’s dad in grammar school. She posted this:

[quote]He got a nice, juicy late career role in HBO's Watchmen a couple years back.

Oh, that was him? I loved him in that! Total scene stealer.

No mention of “Enemy Mine”?

The racism he endured is saddening.

He made his Broadway debut in 1953, and in 1971 received outstanding reviews playing the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in "Murderous Angels". Twenty-five years later, he returned to Broadway to play Billy Flynn in the "Chicago" revival, but things went very wrong (due to lack of rehearsal, nerves, and/or asthma) and he left after only a few performances.

Singing with RIchie Havens in 1987.

RIP

From the article, basis for my R14:

In 1968, he returned to Hollywood for a major role in “Companions in Nightmare,” NBC’s first made-for-TV movie that starred Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter and Patrick O’Neal.

This time, Gossett was booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Universal Studios had rented him a convertible. Driving back to the hotel after picking up the car, he was stopped by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s officer who ordered him to turn down the radio and put up the car’s roof before letting him go.

Within minutes, he was stopped by eight sheriff’s officers, who had him lean against the car and made him open the trunk while they called the car rental agency before letting him go.

“Though I understood that I had no choice but to put up with this abuse, it was a terrible way to be treated, a humiliating way to feel,” Gossett wrote in his memoir. “I realized this was happening because I was Black and had been showing off with a fancy car — which, in their view, I had no right to be driving.”

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.

“Now I had come face-to-face with racism, and it was an ugly sight,” he wrote. “But it was not going to destroy me.”

In the late 1990s, Gossett said he was pulled over by police on the Pacific Coast Highway while driving his restored 1986 Rolls Royce Corniche II. The officer told him he looked like someone they were searching for, but the officer recognized Gossett and left.

Predictions for the next two celebrity deaths-Kate Jackson and Marla Gibbs.

I loved him in 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐞𝐩 (1977), and in 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐞𝐫 (1986).

Colman Domingo (his co-star in The Color Purple) pays tribute:

He died several days ago. I wondered if DL was going to let this pass unnoticed.

I always liked this old guy. He had a way about him. I could believe he was a DI.

I wanted him in me deeply.

Maybe my favorite of all of Gossett’s roles was the black cowboy gun-for-hire that he played in 1990’s “El Diablo,” an excellent HBO Original Film.