During filming of a screen adaptation of “A Raisin in the Sun,” in the early 1960s, he was ushered into a motel crawling with cockroaches due to a dearth of hotels that would accept Black patrons.

In an especially harrowing 1960s incident, California cops chained him to a tree for three hours, apparently judging it suspicious for a Black man to stroll swanky Beverly Hills, he later recalled.

Rattled, he phoned home to his parents in Brooklyn.

“My father said, ‘You stay right there. I’ll be right there.’ Now this is from Brooklyn — they can’t be right there,” Gossett recalled to NPR decades later. “But I understood what he said.”

The incident left an imprint on the young actor. He said his family had raised him to shoot for the stars — to “go completely to the Promised Land.” By age 16, he had made it onto the Broadway stage, appearing in “Take a Giant Step” in 1953.

“I found out that I had to sacrifice something that was right in order to maneuver my way through early Hollywood, so I had to act as if I was second class,” he told NPR. “The only time I was really free was when the director said ‘action’ in front of a camera, or on the stage.”

“That’s when I flew,” he said.

Fly he did. His range and aura of authority won gushing critical reviews.

His Oscar for “An Officer and a Gentleman” in the early 1980s was the first won by a Black actor in 20 years. The Daily News’ film critic at the time, Rex Reed, hailed Gossett’s “wonderful, lean, teeth-grinding performance” as the “meanest drill sergeant you never want to meet.”

Divorce, fatherhood and struggles with addiction to cocaine and alcohol sent him into a spiral in the 1980s. And, for a period, roles dried up.

...continued

©2024 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.