![]() Kotto’s other TV roles included appearances in For Love and Honor, Murder She Wrote and Death Valley Days. His other film credits also included Bill Cosby’s Man and Boy (1971), Across 110th Street (1972), Report to the Commissioner (1975), The Star Chamber (1983), Warning Sign (1985), Eye of the Tiger (1986) and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991). ![]() Kotto went on to play a supporting role as Richard Dickie Coombes in Brubaker in 1980, and then appear in The Running Man. It’s like when you’re in college and someone asks you to the high school dance. “When you’re making movies, you’d tend to say no to TV. “I should have done that, but I walked away,” he admitted in 2015. He also said he turned down the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the character made famous by Sir Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Once you get one of those big blockbuster hits, you better have some other big blockbuster hits to go with it too and be Harrison Ford, because if you don’t… you place yourself right out of the business.” “I was afraid that if I did another space film after having done Alien, then I’d be typed. “I wanted to get back down on Earth,” he said in an interview. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, he took the role of the space ship’s engineer Dennis Parker.įollowing the film’s success, Kotto turned down a role in Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back because he was wary of becoming typecast in the sci-fi genre. Kotto then had roles in 1974’s Truck Turner and 1978’s Blue Collar. Kotto drew plaudits for his role as the first black Bond villain Dr Kananga – an evil Caribbean diplomat masquerading as a New York drug lord – in Live and Let Die, starring Roger Moore. His first few film projects included Nothing But a Man in 1964 and The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. At 19, he made his professional theatre debut in Othello, and later performed on Broadway in The Great White Hope. At the height of his fame, he turned down the role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a decision he later said to have regretted.Kotto was born in New York to a Cameroonian immigrant father and a US Army nurse, and began to study acting at the age of 16. He also starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 dystopian thriller Running Man. ![]() ![]() He then played Chief Tech Dennis Parker in the film Alien, the eighth passenger by Ridley Scott in 1979. This TV movie, released in 1977, told of an Israeli commando operation in 1976 to free the passengers of a Tel-Aviv-Paris flight diverted to Uganda, where the hostage-takers had been hosted by the dictator. He was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada in Raid on Entebbe. The actor was notably applauded for his portrayal of the D r Kananga in the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, released in 1973. He made his debut as a professional actor in Harlem in 1960 in the Othello by Shakespeare with an all-black cast. Yaphet Kotto was born in New York to a father who had emigrated from Cameroon and a nursing mother in the US military. “I know he will be missed”, writes Agent Ryan Goldhar in an email sent to Agence France-Presse (AFP), without specifying the circumstances. The actor was ” a legend “, wrote on Monday March 15th on Facebook his wife Sinahon Thessa, assuring him: “You played the villain in some of your films but you are a real hero for me and for many others as well”. JOHN GILLIS / APĪmerican actor Yaphet Kotto, revealed in the 1970s as the first black “bad guy” of a James Bond and then known for his role as Dennis Parker in Alien, died Monday, March 15 at the age of 81, his agent said.
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