Scotsman Obituaries: Louis Gossett Jr, imposing actor best known for An Officer and a Gentleman

Louis Gossett Jr, actor. Born: 27 May 1936 in New York City. Died: 29 March 2024 in Santa Monica, California, aged 87

Louis Gossett Jr was lauded for his work but never found his way on to Hollywood's A-List (Picture: John Sciulli/Getty Images for Amnesty International USA)

The orders of the tough navy drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman still echo in many memories more than 40 years after the film’s release. And for his performance in the role of Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, Louis Gossett Jr became one of the first black actors to win an Oscar.

Foley, in turn, was one of the first black characters in a Hollywood movie to get to order white characters about, putting Richard Gere through his paces at officer training camp. But the role was never actually intended for a black actor.

It was only after Jack Nicholson turned it down and writer and producer Douglas Day Stewart visited a naval base in Florida and found out that some of their drill instructors were black that he began to consider the possibility of making the character African-American.

Gossett was an imposing figure. Well over 6ft tall, he had turned down the chance to play professional basketball to pursue a career in acting. He already had an Emmy for the landmark mini-series Roots and was hired pretty much as soon as Stewart met him. He was an even more imposing figure when filming began, training with the Marines.

Up until Stewart’s visit to that Florida military base it was just assumed Foley would be white. And when Gossett, a New Yorker, first arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1960s and drove out of the airport in a hire car it was assumed, as a black man, that he had stolen it.

He was twice stopped by police on his drive to his hotel in Beverly Hills. “I realised 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,” he wrote in his autobiography An Actor and a Gentleman. “I had no choice but to put up with this abuse but it was a terrible way to be treated, a humiliating way to feel.”

After dinner on that first night he went for a walk around the area, but a black man walking round Beverly Hills at night was even more suspicious than a black man in a car and he wound up being taken to the police station in handcuffs.

He felt as if he was a second-class citizen and should remember his place. But the tables were turned in front of the cameras on An Officer and a Gentleman when suddenly he was in charge and could let rip at the white boys.

Winning the Oscar for best supporting actor in 1983, Gossett became only the third black actor or actress to win an Academy Award. Hattie McDaniel had won best supporting actress in 1940 for Gone with the Wind and Sidney Poitier won the award for best actor for Lilies of the Field in 1964.

He was born Louis Cameron Gossett on Coney Island in New York City in 1936. His father was a porter, his mother a nurse. At school he excelled at athletics, baseball and basketball, but a leg injury put him on the sidelines and left him with a lot of free time.

It was only at that point that he tried his hand at acting. A school play led almost immediately to an audition for a role in the coming-of-age drama Take a Giant Step. He saw off 400 other candidates, made his Broadway debut at the age of just 17 and won the Donaldson Award for best newcomer.

He studied Drama and played basketball at New York University and he was a contemporary of James Dean at the famous Actors Studio. He had the chance of a trial with the New York Knicks, but instead took a role in the play A Raisin in the Sun, with Sidney Poitier as an ambitious black man making his way in a white world. Gossett and Poitier reprised their roles in the 1961 film.

It was not all plain sailing and Gossett recalled that he managed to keep his finances in the black in the 1960s not through plays or films, but through song, specifically from the anti-war song Handsome Johnny, which he wrote and which Richie Havens performed at Woodstock.

In the 1970s he appeared in such hit television series as The Partridge Family, Bonanza and Little House of the Prairie before playing the slave Fiddler in Roots, though at first he was reluctant to take the part because he felt Fiddler was an Uncle Tom character.

“Doing the research I realised there’s no such thing as an Uncle Tom,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Fiddler, we wouldn’t be in America. He was a survivor. He understood both cultures and knew how to manouevre to stay alive and be solvent. We needed that lesson in order to survive here today.”

His performance won him a Primetime Emmy and over the next 40 years Gossett would gather another seven nominations, most recently just a few years ago for the television version of Watchmen.

Gossett had hoped that his Oscar would catapult him onto the A-List and big money, but he did not receive any film offers for a year. When he did return to a film set it was for Jaws 3-D, which was never likely to win him a second Academy Award.

Next up was an alien in Enemy Mine and a Vietnam veteran in the action movie Iron Eagle, which spawned three sequels.

Gossett struggled with a worsening cocaine habit and with personal problems. Three marriages all ended in divorce. He is survived by two children.

He worked away in film and most notably on television, where one of his Emmy nominations was for his portrayal of Anwar Sadat, but that A-Listing eluded him. “People weren’t ready for me to win,” he said. “I was at the racial edge.”

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