Louis Gossett Jr., Oscars’ First Black Supporting Actor Winner, Dead at 87

Photo: Amy Sussman/Invision/AP

Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, is dead at 87, his cousin Neal L. Gossett confirmed to AP News. Born in 1936 in Sheepshead Bay, Gossett made his Broadway debut while he was still in high school, after auditioning for Louis S. Peterson’s 1953 play Take a Giant Step at the behest of his high-school drama teacher. “Mr. Gossett conveys the whole range of Spencer’s turbulence — manly and boyish at the same time, wild and disciplined, cruel and pitying,” Brooks Atkinson wrote at the time. Gossett went on to originate the role of George Murchison in Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun and made his film debut in the play’s 1961 film adaptation.

Gossett went on to be a staple of New York theater throughout the ’60s, including acting in Jean Genet’s 1961 play The Blacks, Langston Hughes’s 1963 musical Tambourines to Glory, and Harold Rome’s 1965 work The Zulu and the Zayda. His last full Broadway run was in 1968’s Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, in which a white Jewish man insists on being a Black law student’s slave because of white guilt. The play, directed by Sidney Poitier, was called “very sad and very sick” in the Times and ran for just seven performances.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Gossett played his most indelible roles — playing Fiddler in the 1977 miniseries Roots won him an Emmy, and playing Emil Foley in 1982’s An Officer and a Gentlemen won him an Oscar. He was the third Black actor to win an Oscar, after Hattie McDaniel for Gone With the Wind and Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field, and the first to win Best Supporting Actor. In the years after his win, Gossett stayed busy, earning four more Emmy nominations — with his last coming in 2019 for playing Will Reeves in the Watchmen limited series. His final role was in the 2023 The Color Purple musical.