He explored that cruel past in the landmark 1977 television miniseries “Roots”. Gossett won a Primetime Emmy for the role of Fiddler. It wasn’t an easy part to play. Fiddler, an enslaved person, is tasked with helping to break the younger Kunta Kinte, played by LeVar Burton, and make a proud young Mandinka into an American slave. Gossett had to use his gifts to find the humanity in a character charged with being a tool of an unspeakable process of dehumanization.
There’s a certain poetry in Gossett’s major roles. He played the walking embodiment of assimilation in Hansberry’s play, then a man crushed by the mental and spiritual pressures of resistance for Hal Ashby. Fiddler in some ways was the first of the mentor figures that Gossett would spend the rest of his career playing, notably U.S. Army Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in Taylor Hackford’s 1982 hit “An Officer and a Gentleman”. The part was not written for a Black man, but Taylor Hackford saw the potential in letting Gossett play this character who is tasked with brutally conditioning wild young men into disciplined soldiers. It won Gossett the Academy Award, making him the first Black actor to win Best Supporting Actor, and the second Black male actor to ever win an Academy Award, trailing, of all people, Sidney Poitier.
An Oscar usually leads to bigger parts and bigger opportunities. Alas, the times didn’t offer Louis Gossett, Jr. much in the way of parts equal to his vast talent. But he kept working, turning in memorable roles as an alien in Wolfgang Petersen’s “Enemy Mine,” a sci-fi riff on “The Defiant Ones” alongside Dennis Quaid with a fascinating gender twist; and in the four “Iron Eagle” films (the first film in the series came out months before “Top Gun” even though we will always think of them as knockoffs) as a Vietnam vet pilot who has to mentor the son of a fellow pilot.
Gossett was a consummate professional, always delivering excellence whether it was one day on a television movie, a thin part in a faith-based project, or voice work for a video game. In an era when bad behavior was tolerated, he was known for his kindness and his craftsmanship. His final act gave him a critical part in Damon Lindelof’s HBO series “Watchmen,” and his last part in a major studio release as Old Mister in last year’s “The Color Purple”.
Timing is everything, and Gossett was forged in the times he was born in, as we all are. Of all the lessons his life has to offer young artists, Gossett stands tall for his commitments to craft, to his humanity, and to bring both of those to bear on parts that were sometimes dangerously close to cliche. His gifts and his commitment to his craft made everything he did into something so much more.