Obituary: Robert Guillame, actor, singer, Emmy Award-winner for Benson the butler in Soap and Benson
Robert Guillaume, who rose from squalid beginnings in St Louis slums to become a star in stage musicals and win Emmy Awards for his portrayal of the sharp-tongued butler in the TV sitcoms Soap and Benson, has died at age 89.
Guillaume died at home in Los Angeles, according to his widow, Donna Brown Guillaume. He had been battling prostate cancer.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdAmong Guillaume’s achievements was playing Nathan Detroit in the first all-black version of Guys and Dolls, earning a Tony nomination in 1977. He became the first African-American to sing the title role of Phantom of the Opera, appearing with an all-white cast in Los Angeles.
While playing in Guys and Dolls, he was asked to test for the role of an acerbic butler of a governor’s mansion in Soap, a primetime TV sitcom that satirised soap operas.
“The minute I saw the script, I knew I had a live one,” he recalled in 2001. “Every role was written against type, especially Benson, who wasn’t subservient to anyone. To me, Benson was the revenge for all those stereotyped guys who looked like Benson in the ’40s and ’50s [movies] and had to keep their mouths shut.”
The character became so popular that ABC was persuaded to launch a spin-off, simply called Benson, which lasted from 1979 to 1986. The series made Guillaume wealthy and famous, but he regretted that Benson’s wit had to be toned down to make him more appealing as the lead star.
The career of Robert Guillaume almost ended in January 1999 at Walt Disney Studio. He was appearing in the TV series Sports Night as Isaac Jaffee, executive producer of a sports highlight show. Returning to his dressing room after a meal away from the studio, he suddenly collapsed.
“I fell on the floor, and I couldn’t get up,” he told an interviewer in 2001. “I kept floundering about on the floor and I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know it was it was caused by my left side being weaker than the other.”
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdFortunately, St Joseph Hospital was directly across from the studio. The 71-year-old actor was taken there and treated for a stroke.
Guillaume’s stroke was minor, causing relatively slight damage and little effect on his speech. After six weeks in the hospital, he underwent a therapy of walks and sessions in the gym. He returned to the second season of Sports Night and it was written into the script that Isaac Jaffee was recovering from a stroke. Because of slim ratings, the second season proved to be the last for the much-praised show.
Guillaume resumed his career and travelled as a new spokesman for the American Stroke Association. He also made appearance for the American Heart Association.
“I’m a bastard, a Catholic, the son of a prostitute, and a product of the poorest slums of St Louis.”
This was the opening of Guillaume: A Life, his 2002 autobiography in which he laid bare his troubled life. He was born fatherless on 30 November, 1927, in St Louis, one of four children. His mother named him Robert Peter Williams; when he became a performer he adopted Guillaume, a French version of Williams, believing the change would give him distinction.
His early years were spent in a back-alley apartment without plumbing or electricity; an outhouse was shared with two dozen people. His alcoholic mother hated him because of his dark skin, and his grandmother rescued him, taught him to read and enrolled him in a Catholic school.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdSeeking but denied his mother’s love and scorned by nuns and students because of his dark skin, the boy became a rebel, and that carried into his adult life. He was expelled from school and then the army, though he was granted an honorable discharge. He fathered a daughter and abandoned the child and her mother. He did the same to his first wife and two sons and to another woman and a daughter.
He worked in a department store, the post office and as St Louis’s first black streetcar motorman. Seeking something better, he enrolled at St Louis University, excelling in philosophy and Shakespeare, and then at Washington University (St Louis) where a music professor trained the young man’s superb tenor singing voice.
After serving as an apprentice at theatres in Aspen, Colorado, and Cleveland, the newly named Guillaume toured with Broadway shows Finian’s Rainbow, Golden Boy, Porgy and Bess and Purlie, and began appearing on sitcoms such as The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son. Then came Soap and Benson. His period of greatest success was marred by tragedy when his 33-year-old son Jacques died of Aids.
Guillaume’s first stable relationship came when he married TV producer Donna Brown in 1985 and fathered a daughter, Rachel. At last he was able to shrug off the bitterness he had felt throughout his life.
HILLEL ITALIE