John Amos, actor in breakthrough TV role, dies at 84

Talent agency Buchwald, which represented him, announced the death but did not provide a specific cause. It was unclear why the family waited until weeks after his death to reveal it.

After being cut by 13 professional and minor-league football teams in his 20s, often because of injuries, Mr. Amos supported himself variously as a ditch-digger, lumberjack, restaurant manager, social worker and advertising copywriter. With a self-confessed short fuse and a flair for showmanship, he found an outlet for his frustration and creativity in comedy writing, which he performed in nightclubs.

He enjoyed the applause and later said that being on stage “allowed me to be a different person without getting in trouble.”

Settling in Los Angeles, he tried to break into TV by creating ideas for comic sketches. “When I first started in the business, trying to get a job as a writer, I'd walk in, and they'd see a black guy with a 19-inch neck,” he recalled to Newsday. The response he got, he said, was, “What do you know about comedy?”

His breakthrough came in 1969, when he became one of the first African Americans to write on staff for a network program (“The Leslie Uggams Show” on CBS). Impressing the executives with his comic timing, he soon started acting on camera.

In the popular Eddie Murphy movie comedy “Coming to America” ​​(1988), Mr. Amos was the self-important fast-food restaurant owner who insisted that his McDowell's – the “Big Mick” sandwich and the “Golden Arcs” – were home. Not a copy of McDonald's because “my buns have no seeds.”

He played a brutal prison guard in the Sylvester Stallone film “Locked Up” (1989) and a renegade special forces officer in the Bruce Willis action hit “Die Hard 2” (1990). But towards the end of his career, he was best known for his TV roles.

Her career was sometimes hampered by her admittedly “tough” nature, which she attributes to her upbringing in New Jersey by a single mother who taught her to stand up for herself as she helped integrate classrooms in the 1940s and 1950s. During his years in Hollywood, he campaigned for acting opportunities for black actors beyond the pimps and drug pushers that were often cast.

In 1970, he landed a recurring guest spot as Gordie the Weatherman on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on a Minneapolis TV station. He said he was grateful that the writers didn't typecast him as a sportscaster but instead presented him as a suave, self-assured meteorologist who, Mr. Amos said, “can think beyond the X's and O's.”

His career received another boost in 1973 when producer Norman Lear cast Mr. Amos as the unemployed husband of Maude Findlay's maid — playing Esther — in the sitcom “Maude” starring Bea Arthur.

The following year, he and Rolle starred in a spinoff, “Good Times,” created by Lear, which aired on CBS until 1979. The show was considered a breakthrough for its portrayal of a loving two-parent Black family — led by James and Florida Evans — trying to make ends meet in a high-rise housing project in Chicago.

“I was carrying the burden of being the first black father of an entire family,” Mr. Amos told the website Vulture in 2015, “and I took that responsibility seriously. Maybe too much so. … I knew millions of black people were watching. I Knew my own father was watching. And I wasn't going to portray anything less than redeeming.”

Amid traditional sitcom high jinks, the show addressed gang violence and teenage pregnancy, among other social issues. But Mr. Amos regularly clashed with the all-white writing staff and with Lear, whom he considered downplaying serious topical issues to focus on the antics of his fast-talking screen son JJ, played by wiry comedian Jimmy Walker. .

Mr. Amos finds Walker's emphasis on silly struts and wardrobes, “Die-no-mite” Catch phrases and shady, get-rich-quick schemes are offensive. He claimed that his character should have paid more attention to his two other children, who aspire to become a doctor and a lawyer. He and Rolle, stunned by Walker's breakout stardom and the example he set for black youth, had little contact with him on set.

Mr. Amos, who protested angrily against the show's direction, fired Leah over the phone in 1976, and the James Evans character was killed in a car accident. The author, Mr. Amos recalled decades later, was “tired of risking their lives for jokes.”

Shortly after leaving “Good Times,” Mr. Amos played the adult Kunta Kinte in the 1977 ABC miniseries “Roots.” The TV show, based on Alex Haley's best-selling book of the same name, traces the effects of slavery on a black family through the generations.

The production ran for eight nights and reached 130 million viewers, making it one of the highest-rated programs in television history. “Roots” provided a rare high-profile dramatic outlet for black actors, including Levar Burton (Kunta Kinte Jr.), Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson and Ben Vereen. It swept the Emmy Awards and Mr. Amos received a nomination for his role.

But the performance didn't translate into bigger or better roles for him. He rejected a part in “Roots: The Next Generations” (1979), saying that the contemporaneity of the story turned the characters into soap-opera figures. He rejected other roles that he found stereotyped or demeaning. He preferred to wait, he told the San Francisco Examiner, “for a chance to do something I could be proud of.”

Beginning in 1984, he spent a year playing a hard-driving police captain on the NBC drama “Hunter” opposite Fred Dryer, but he again fell out with the producers. Mr. Amos argued that his character — a black role model — should be calmly in control, not the angry man the writers envisioned.

He later worked on the sitcoms “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “In the House”. Smoothing over his differences with Lear, Mr. Amos starred in the producer's short-lived sitcom “704 Houser” (1994) about an auto mechanic whose liberal political views put him at odds with a conservative boy who is dating a white woman. .

Over the next two decades, Mr. Amos played recurring roles as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on “The West Wing,” the mayor of Washington on “The District,” an Alaskan bush pilot on “Men in Trees” and a macho. Gay man (whose lover is played by Stacey Keach) in “Two and a Half Men”.

He toured for years in “Halley's Comet,” a one-man show he wrote about an Octobarian who reflects on his life. It has become a staple of regional theater and black arts festivals.

The desire to write such a play grew out of a painful memory from his youth.

She told Ebony Magazine that in third grade, she was bullied by a white music teacher for refusing to sing Stephen Foster Parlor's song “Old Black Joe” at a school singalong. He cried in front of 800 smiling students but held his ground.

“As a result of that incident,” he said, “it became my ambition to create roles for myself and other black and minority actors that were more reflective of our contribution to the world. … It gave me the strength to turn down jobs that paid astronomical amounts. It also gave me the confidence that God was preparing me for something bigger than the jobs I was turning down.”

John Allen Amos Jr. was born on December 27, 1939 in Newark and raised in nearby East Orange. His father was a truck driver and mechanic, and his mother was a homemaker and later a nutritionist.

Mr. Amos was 2 years old when his parents divorced, and as a teenager, he supported the family by working as a garbage collector and street cleaner. On athletic scholarships, he attended Long Beach (Calif.) City College and Colorado State University.

After being cut from his last football team, the British Columbia Lions, he headed to Los Angeles to pursue a break in TV comedy. At his day job in advertising, he was not the most committed employee and was warned off after presenting his bosses with a fake ad campaign for an embalming machine; It featured a corpse attached to a gas pump and had the tagline, “You bring them, we fill them.”

He moonlighted for a local TV comedy program before joining the writing staff of “The Leslie Ughams Show.” He also made brief appearances as an actor, billed as Johnny Amos, and his credits include Melvin Van Peebles' low-budget landmark of black and independent cinema, “Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song” (1971). “Melvin and I are friends, and he needed a guy on a motorcycle, and I had one,” he later told a reporter.

Mr. Amos also appeared in films including Disney's “The World's Greatest Athlete” (1973), in which he played a harried college track coach, and “Let's Do It Again” (1975), opposite Sidney as a Kansas City bookmaking heavy named Mac. Poitier and Bill Cosby as a pair of good-natured schemers.

His marriages to Noel Mickelson, actresses Lillian Lehman and Elisabeth de Sousa ended in divorce. He had two children from his first marriage, director and actor Casey Amos and Shannon Amos.

In 2023, Mr. Amos publicly accused Shannon of grand malfeasance when he filed a complaint accusing an unnamed party of the same crime and started a GoFundMe page to seek money to help with his legal complaint. The Los Angeles Police Department launched an investigation earlier this year, and the case was closed due to a lack of evidence and a family dispute with the department, People magazine reported.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

After settling in New Jersey in the 1980s, Mr. Amos started a foundation to teach inner-city youth how to set aside differences and work toward a common goal.

Reflecting on his own nature, Mr. Amos, in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, said he had mellowed considerably with age and recounted a run-in with Willis during the filming of “Die Hard 2.” his point

Willis, an on-screen tough guy, called Mr. Amos a clown for taking extra time to rehearse a scene. Mr. Amos said he put an arm around Willis and remarked on their shared upbringing in the rough and tumble of New Jersey, remarking that if they were classmates, he would have hounded Willis for his lunch money every day.

“I'll never work with Bruce Willis again,” he said, “but he'll never disrespect John Amos again. … Everybody's got respect until they lose it. And when they disrespect it, call them out on it.”