Yaphet Kotto, an imposing actor descended from African royals and known for playing tough characters in a series of films such as “Alien” and “Midnight Run”, passed away near Manila in the Philippines on Monday. He was 81.
His death, Tuesday, was confirmed by his agent, Ryan Goldhar. His wife, Thessa Sinahon, announced this in a Facebook post. No other details were immediately available.
Mr. Kotto, who said he came from his father’s side of the Cameroonian kingdom, began studying at the Actors Mobile Theater Studio at 16, according to Variety, and by 19 he was making his professional theater debut in “Othello”.
He regularly played police officers, criminals and other hardened personalities on screen. He received a Primetime Emmy Award for his portrayal of President Idi Amin, the murderous Ugandan strongman, in the 1976 television movie “Raid on Entebbe”.
He also starred as a police lieutenant in the television hit ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ in the 1990s, a former prisoner in the 1978 film ‘Blue Collar’ and a prison guard in ‘Brubaker’, a film about a prison from 1980 with Robert Redford also in the lead role.
He even played a few Bond villains in the 1973 film “Live and Let Die”: both a corrupt Caribbean dictator and the character of that character, a drug dealer named Mr. Big.
In 1993, Mr. Kotto, who stood 6 feet 3, told The Baltimore Sun that such roles give a distorted picture of what he really was like.
‘I want to play a much more sensitive man. “A family man,” he told the newspaper. “There’s an aspect of black people’s lives that does not run or jump.”
Yaphet Frederick Kotto was born in Harlem on November 15, 1939 and grew up in the Bronx. His father was Cameroonian royalty, reports The Baltimore Sun. His mother was of Panamanian and West Indian descent. The couple divorced when Mr. Kotto was a child, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents.
Mr. Kotto has been married three times; he and me. Sinahon, originally from the Philippines, was married in 1998 in Baltimore.
Mr. Kotto had six children. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
One of the first parts of mr. Kotto was a supporting role in the 1964 film “Nothing but a Man”, about a black couple dealing with discrimination in the deep south. He has had more than 90 other acting credits, in film, on television and on Broadway.
He especially played Parker, an engineer who had the task of repairing a spaceship in ‘Alien’, the 1979 film by Ridley Scott.
In 1988’s action comedy “Midnight Run”, starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, he plays FBI agent Alonzo Mosely, whose stolen ID is being carried for a running joke. And in ‘The Running Man’, a dystopian 1987 thriller set in the then near future (2019), Mr. Kotto a resistance fighter with Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fascist version of America.