One of the versatile actors who carved a niche for himself in world’s movie industry, Yaphet Kotto is dead. He was 81.
The late actor’s many reverberating roles include the wisecracking engineer in the hit science-fiction film “Alien,” the villainous adversary in the James Bond movie “Live and Let Die” and a police lieutenant on the long-running television series “Homicide: Life on the Street”.
Kotto’s agent, Ryan Goldhar, who confirmed the death, said he did not know the cause. Kotto had lived in the Philippines for some years, reports said.
Local reports have it that the late icon worked mostly in the theater for the first decade or so of his career. Analysts are of the view that his bodily size made him a dominating figure in any sort of role, though it tended to bring him parts as a heavy.
Yaphet Frederick Kotto was born on Nov. 15, 1939, in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. According to him, his father was from Cameroon and jumped ship as a merchant seaman, ending up in New York; his mother, he said, was of Panamanian and West Indian descent. His father had adopted Judaism, and his mother was Roman Catholic.
The couple separated when Kotto was a child, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents, reports said.
In one of his remarks, Kotto averred that his career path was set by a fateful trip to the movies.
Speaking to The Orange County Register of California in 1994, he said “One day, when I was about 16, I walked into this theater showing ‘On the Waterfront’ and I saw Marlon Brando for the first time”.
“I couldn’t speak. It was like somebody had punched me in the stomach. It was like someone had crashed cymbals in both ears. I was blasted out of the theater. I knew from that moment that I wanted to be an actor.”
Records have it that Kotto received an Emmy nomination for his performance as Idi Amin, the Ugandan strongman, in the 1977 television movie “Raid on Entebbe.” He appeared opposite Robert Redford in the prison movie “Brubaker” in 1980.
Among others, in the 1988 action-comedy “Midnight Run,” starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, he played the F.B.I. agent Alonzo Mosely, whose stolen ID becomes fodder for a running joke. And in “The Running Man,” a dystopian 1987 thriller set in what was then the near future (2019), Kotto played a resistance fighter alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fascist version of America.
It was gathered that the movie icon married three times. Reports have it that Kotto was always conscious of the image projected by his roles, something that led him to reject certain ones.
