R.I.P. Louis Gossett Jr.

Academy Award winning actor Louis Gossett Jr. has died age 87...

From Variety 

Louis Gossett Jr., who won a supporting actor Oscar for playing the hard-as-nails drill instructor in 1982’s “An Officer and a Gentleman” a few years after winning an Emmy for his role as the cunning Fiddler in “Roots,” has died, the AP reports. He was 87.

Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He made his stage debut at 17 in a school production of “You Can’t Take It With You”; a sports injury had prompted his decision to take an acting class. He also fought polio while growing up. He was offered an athletic scholarship but went on his own dime to NYU, where the tall young man could have played varsity basketball, which he declined to do in favor of theatrical pursuits.

Gossett had already made his Broadway debut, in 1953, despite no formal training as an actor, replacing Bill Gunn as Spencer Scott in “Take a Giant Step,” which the New York Times’ drama critics named one of the 10 best shows of the year. He drew his first mention in Variety for his work in the play.

In Taylor Hackford’s “An Officer and a Gentleman,” Gossett’s Sgt. Emil Foley memorably drove Richard Gere’s character to the point of near collapse at a Navy flight school. Gossett was the first Black man to win the best supporting actor Oscar for that role.

In addition to “An Officer and a Gentleman” Gossett is best known for films “Enemy Mine” (1985), in which he played an alien forced to come to terms with his human enemy when he and an astronaut played by Dennis Quaid find themselves stranded on a planet, and “Iron Eagle” (1986), in which he played an Air Force veteran who helps a young pilot find his father, who has been shot down and captured.