R.I.P. Louis Gossett Jr., Oscar winner for An Officer And A Gentleman

Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win the award for Supporting Actor at the Oscars, has died, according to The Associated Press. His cousin confirmed to the outlet that the actor died Thursday night in Santa Monica, California; no cause of death has yet been revealed. He was 87 years old.

“Never mind the awards, never mind the glitz and glamor, the Rolls-Royces and the big houses in Malibu. It’s about the humanity of the people that he stood for,” his cousin Neal L. Gossett told the AP.

Gossett began his career on Broadway in the 1950s when he was just 16 years old. He went on to star opposite Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands in Raisin In The Sun, eventually reprising his stage role in the 1961 film adaptation, which brought him to Hollywood for the first time. He would become a critically acclaimed star of both stage and screen, working with Sammy Davis Jr. on Broadway, earning an Emmy for his role in the iconic 1977 miniseries Roots, and becoming just the third Black nominee—and first-ever winner—of the Supporting Actor award at the Oscars for An Officer And A Gentleman.

But as a trailblazer, Gossett was not exempt from experiencing racism throughout his career. Speaking with The A.V. Club in 2010, he recalled the intense bigotry he faced because of the markers of success (a fancy car, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel) that came with starring in Companions In Nightmare in 1968. After Roots, he said, “There was a backlash for about eight months to a year before blacks were working in television again.” And even his historic Oscar win didn’t move the needle as much as he expected: “It did create a lot of opportunities, but I thought there would be more. I thought it would be a windfall. But it wasn’t,” he reflected. “It was what it was. It only affected me for a little while, and then it stopped affecting me. I just come out the other end.”

While Gossett was quick to clarify that “The whole of a 58- or 59-year career was wonderful,” part of coming out the other end was creating the Eracism Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to combatting racism. His activism—Gossett’s cousin remembered him as a “man who walked with Nelson Mandela”—is just one of the many fascinating aspects of Gossett’s colorful off-screen life, much of which he detailed in his memoir An Actor And A Gentleman. He befriended James Dean and partied with the Rat Pack; he “emceed the Cafe Wha? hootenannies,” as he told The A.V. Club, and wrote folk songs for Richie Havens (who performed Gossett’s song “Handsome Johnny” at Woodstock). In California, he spent time with The Mamas and the Papas and Roman Polanski, and said he narrowly missed being murdered by Charles Manson’s followers when Sharon Tate was killed, one of a handful of near-misses in his life. “Finally you get the point: be careful, don’t go anywhere,” he joked in his “Random Roles” interview.

Of course, Gossett didn’t take his own advice; he continued to go places and stretch himself, remaining active in his career through the final year of his life, most recently appearing in the musical adaptation of The Color Purple. In 2019, he starred in the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries Watchmen opposite Regina King. “We could read the telephone book together, I wouldn’t mind,” he told The A.V. Club in 2019. “[We] made a little magic together, and I sometimes feel like maybe in some other lifetime we were relatives anyway.”

Gossett said at the time what compelled him about the story of Watchmen was its theme of people needing each other in order to make the world better. “Because there’s no time for resentment, there’s no time for revenge. There’s no time for bad things. There’s only time for us to get together for mutual salvation; otherwise, we’re all lost. We have to work together to clear up the oceans, and make sure the food chain is there available for us all. I have a personal opinion that every child in the world has to have free medicine, free food, shelter, clothing, and education. We have to make sure every child is educated. That’s how you make the world better, not worse,” he said. “So we all must be together to make that mutual decision to do that. It should be a necessary thing, and everything we do on a daily basis should be for the benefit of the whole tribe. So we have to stop this ‘me against you.’ There’s no such thing anymore.”