Academy Award winner Louis Gossett Jr., best known for his celebrated work in Roots and An Officer and a Gentleman, has died. He was 87.
The Associated Press confirmed news of Gossett’s death after the actor’s nephew told the outlet that he died Thursday night in Santa Monica, California. No cause of death has yet been revealed.
Born in New York City, Louis Gossett got his acting start on Broadway inTake a Giant Step in 1953, when he was still a student at Abraham Lincoln High School. As he explained in a 1991 conversation with Bob Costas, he had “a pretty promising career in high school.”
“‘They’re looking for a young, Black kid to play a lead in a Broadway show called Take a Giant Step. They can’t find anybody in the business, so they’re going to the high schools. ‘Tell your mother to take you down there,'” he recalled being told. “So, that’s how I got in show business.”
In the years that followed, Gossett attended New York University and acted in Broadway’s The Desk Set in 1955 and 1956. His film debut came with 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun, which has since been entered into the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. The movie was released two years after the original Lorraine Hansberry play premiered on Broadway, with Gossett acting alongside the legendary Sidney Poitier.
“I was in awe of that man — his experience and strength,” Louis Gossett told PEOPLE of the late Sidney Poitier in 2024. “I supported him, and he supported me.”
At the beginning of his film career in the 1960s, Gossett also performed as a folk musician (“I passed the brass playing in the coffee shops down in the Village,” he told PEOPLE) and played sports. He even turned down a potential professional basketball stint to focus on acting. “I was at rookie training for the [New York] Knicks when I got a call from Lorraine Hansberry to be a part of A Raisin in the Sun,” Louis Gossett told PEOPLE.
“They said the part comes with a $700 per diem, more money than most professional athletes had in the bank at the time. I put the basketball down, and the rest is history,” he added.
After moving to Los Angeles in the ’60s to focus on film and television, his next breakthrough role came in 1977, when he played Fiddler in Roots, earning an Emmy award for outstanding lead actor in a single appearance in a drama or comedy series. He later admitted that he was initially hesitant to take the gig.