actor
Personal Information
Born on July 9, 1942, in New Rochelle, New York; son of a chauffeur and a housekeeper; married, Karen; children: Tayler, Morgan, and John.
Education: Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois.
Career
Actor. Enrolled in Negro Ensemble Company acting workshop, 1967; appeared in plays with Negro Ensemble Company, late 1960s; made film debut in What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, 1970; starring roles in Shaft, 1971, and two sequels; appeared in Earthquake, 1974; appeared in television miniseries Roots, 1977; appeared in Inchon, 1981; suffered from breast cancer, early 1990s; numerous film and television appearances, 1980s and 1990s; appeared in Shaft remake, 2000.
Life's Work
The modern image of the black male in cinema began with Richard Roundtree. As the charismatic private detective John Shaft in the wildly successful 1971 film Shaft, Roundtree created a black action hero of an entirely new kind: confident, hip, funny, triumphant over white antagonists, and possessed of a certain enjoyment of life. For American movie audiences of the 1970s, Roundtree was among the most recognizable of all the leading men in Hollywood. His career took a downturn in the 1980s as he proved unable to escape the typecasting his own success had engendered, but despite a serious illness, his career flourished once again on film and television screen in the 1990s.
Roundtree was born in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, New York, on July 9, 1942. His father was a chauffeur and his mother a housekeeper. In high school he showed hints of the glamorous presence he would later develop on screen when he was voted the most popular, best dressed, and best looking student in his senior class. Roundtree also excelled as an athlete and went on to Southern Illinois University on a football scholarship. But he found his true calling when he got involved with campus stage productions at SIU.
Dropping out of college, Roundtree headed back to New York and bounced through a series of jobs that seemed random but actually combined to help him develop a classy image and presence. He sold suits for a time at New York's Barney's department store and had some success as a male fashion model with the Ebony Fashion Fair. Finally the acting impulse drew him toward the theater again, and in 1967 he enrolled in a workshop program run by the Negro Ensemble Company, a pioneering black theatrical organization of the day. Roundtree appeared in a number of the company's productions, including The Great White Hope--the original stage version of a story about boxer Jack Johnson that was filmed several years later.
Auditioned for Shaft
Roundtree had a small part in the 1970 film What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? His breakthrough and career high point came the following year. He heard about a new detective film being made by the famed African American director, photographer, writer, and musician Gordon Parks Sr., who three years earlier had become the first black director of a major-studio American film with The Learning Tree. Roundtree auditioned for the lead role of John Shaft, and got the part. Studio executives asked that he shave off his elegant handlebar moustache, but director Parks demanded that he be allowed to keep it.
In the finished film Roundtree is the very model of aplomb, but as a young, struggling actor in his first starring role he approached the filming of Shaft with considerable nervousness. "I was scared to death," he said in Blacks in American Films and Television, adding that he "didn't really...begin to feel comfortable with the character until three-fourths of the way through the film." But director Parks shrewdly exploited Roundtree's inexperience, bringing out a natural quality in him that was essential to the film's success.
For Roundtree in Shaft was above all fun to watch. As Essence magazine critic Maurice Peterson (quoted in Black Action Films) pointed out, "Shaft is the first picture to show a black man who leads a life free from racial torment. He is black and proud of it, but not obsessed with it...Shaft keeps his blackness in perspective." The film's plot, which enmeshed Roundtree's classic private-eye hero in a three-way conflict involving black gangsters, the Mafia, and the New York City police, allowed audiences to root for an African American hero against white villains. Few previous films had done that, but even more important to the film's success was Roundtree's image: resplendent in beige turtlenecks and leather coats, he exuded a muscular, down-to-earth charm that was perfectly complemented by Isaac Hayes's hit soundtrack for the film.
Appeared in Roots
That image landed Roundtree on the cover of national magazines: Newsweek, Ebony, and Jet. The success of Shaft spawned two sequels, Shaft's Big Score and Shaft in Africa, with Roundtree reprising his leading role. Roundtree landed other starring roles, such as 1973's Charley One Eye, and appeared in blockbusters like the 1974 disaster film Earthquake and the epic and groundbreaking 1977 television miniseries Roots.
By the 1980s, Roundtree's career had fallen on harder times. Identified with the black action genre, he found it difficult to find top roles when that genre went into decline. His involvement in the 1981 big-budget flop Inchon didn't help matters. Roundtree still worked steadily, but his roles were mostly confined to television series, shoestring direct-to-video productions, and quickie foreign-made films. Hollywood, after an initial flurry of activity in the 1970s, was in general less receptive to strong black cinematic figures in the 1980s and 1990s, and Roundtree's career paid the price.
He himself wrote, in his foreword to the book Black Action Films, that "[b]lacks are and have always been a part of America, yet institutional racism has smothered many of our accomplishments, including our achievements in Hollywood." Reflecting on the dry spell in his career, he wrote, "I have appeared in more than 30 films and have had my own television program, but the road has been a rocky one, as it is for most blacks in Hollywood. Yet we continue to persevere and hone our craft. We continue to seek excellence regardless of the barriers."
Nominated for Image Award
That perseverance paid off in the 1990s as the quality of the parts that came Roundtree's way began to improve. He appeared in the stylish 1995 thriller Seven, co-starred in the critically acclaimed memoir of black Southern life Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored, and had a lead role as a teen crisis center administrator in the television series 413 Hope St., an effort that brought him a Best Lead Actor in a Dramatic Series nomination at the 1998 Image Awards. Domestic happiness came Roundtree's way as well; he is married and lives in bucolic Agoura, California, with his wife Karen and three children, Tayler, Morgan, and John.
Unbeknownst to those who followed his resurgent career, however, Roundtree was battling a serious illness. In 1993, he was diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease rare but by no means unheard-of among males. "One morning, I'm in the shower, and getting ready to go to work, and I feel this lump under the nipple," Roundtree was quoted in Jet. He underwent a radical mastectomy and months of grueling chemotherapy treatments, all the while hiding his condition from his coworkers. By the year 2000, Roundtree had gone public with his ordeal and was pleased to be able to announce that he had been given a bill of cancer-free health. A part that year in a new remake of Shaft reminded the American movie going public of the changes he had helped to set in motion.
Awards
Golden Globe nomination, Most Promising Newcomer, 1972; MTV Movie Award Lifetime Achievement Award, 1994 (both for Shaft); Image Award nomination, 1998, for 413 Hope St.
Works
Selected films
- What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, 1970.
- Shaft, 1971.
- Shaft's Big Score, 1972.
- Charley One-Eye, 1972.
- Shaft in Africa, 1973.
- Earthquake, 1974.
- Man Friday, 1975.
- Roots, 1977 (made for television).
- An Eye for an Eye, 1981.
- Inchon, 1981.
- A Time to Die, 1991.
- Amityville: A New Generation, 1993.
- Ballistic, 1995.
- Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored, 1996.
- George of the Jungle, 1997.
- Shaft, 2000.
Further Reading
Books
- Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Films and Television, Garland, 1988.
- Katz, Ephraim, The Film Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., HarperPerennial, 1998.
- Leab, Daniel, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures, Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
- Lloyd, Ann, and Graham Fuller, eds., The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, Macmillan, 1983.
- Parish, James Robert, and George H. Hill, Black Action Films, with foreword by Richard Roundtree, McFarland, 1989.
Periodicals- Entertainment Weekly, March 29, 1996, p. 73; September 20, 1996, p. 92.
- Jet, May 1, 2000, p. 34.
- People, April 24, 2000, p. 85.
Other- Additional information was obtained on-line at the Internet Movie Database at http://us.imdb.com, and The All-Movie Guide, http://www.allmovie.com.
— James M. Manheim
