actor
Personal Information
Born Yaphet Fredrick Kotto, November 15, 1944, in New York City; son of Yaphet Mangobell (later changed name to Abraham Kotto) and Gladys Maria Kotto; married Rita Dittman, 1963 (divorced, 1975); married Antoinette Pettyjohn, January 29, 1975; children: (first marriage) Natasha, Fredrick, Robert; (second marriage) Sarada, Mirabai, Salina.
Politics: Democrat.
Career
Professional actor, 1962--; made stage debut in Shakespeare's Othello; other stage appearances include roles in The Great White Hope, 1970, and Fences, 1990. Film appearances include roles in Nothing But a Man, 1965; The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968; The Liberation of L. B. Jones, 1970; Across 110th Street, 1972; Live and Let Die, 1973; Truck Turner, 1974; Friday Foster, 1975; Sharks' Treasure, 1975; Report to the Commissioner, 1975; Drum, 1976; Blue Collar, 1978; Alien, 1979; Brubaker, 1980; Fighting Back, 1982; Hey Good Lookin', 1982; Star Chamber, 1983; Warning Sign, 1985; Prettykill, 1987; and Midnight Run, 1988. Television actor, 1967--, appearing in episodes of The Big Valley, Bonanza, Daniel Boone, Hawaii Five-0, Mannix, and Gunsmoke; in television movies Raid on Entebbe, 1977, Rage, 1980, Women of San Quentin, 1983, Badge of the Assassin, 1985, Harem (miniseries), 1986, Desperado, 1987, and The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, 1994; and as star of series For Love and Honor, 1983, and Homicide, 1993. Author of The Royalty, White Loitus, Inc., 1990.
Life's Work
Actor Yaphet Kotto has been recognized as a master of his craft. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker called his acting "quietly beautiful"; a Village Voice contributor referred to him as "that solid, great actor"; and Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Film and Television, wrote that his characterizations had "an unerring solid decency" and "a fair- minded intelligence that made him heroic." But Kotto--for most of his more than three-decade-long career--has been a great actor consigned to mediocre roles. He has been typecast as a villain or a cop, pigeonholed in buddy action pictures, and even forced to play demeaning roles, like a eunuch in the television miniseries "Harem."
"I'm tired of playing detectives," Kotto stated in an interview for the Baltimore Sun in 1993. "I'm always called powerful, bulky or imposing.... Or they say I fill up a room. I'm a 200-pound, 6-foot 3-inch black guy. And I think I have this image of a monster. It's very difficult." He told the Sun, "I want to try to play a much more sensitive man. A family man."
Kotto played a few "sensitive" roles in stage presentations, appearing in The Great White Hope and Fences; in films and on television, however, he's had a harder time breaking the tough-guy image. In 1993 he debuted as Lieutenant Giardello in NBC television's Thursday-night cop drama, Homicide. Created by movie producer Barry Levinson, Homicide mixes documentary- style camera work with sharp character studies. The series propelled Kotto back onto the small screen after years of feature film work.
Kotto traces his family history back to the Douala region of Cameroon in western Africa, where his father Manga Bell, was a prince and grandson of King Alexander Bell, the nation's monarch during the late nineteenth century. When the Germans began to move into Cameroon in the 1920s, Kotto's family emigrated to New York City. Having settled in Harlem, Kotto's father took the given name Abraham, because he had converted to Judaism in Cameroon; the surname Kotto (meaning "trees" in Cameroonian) was the name of a cousin.
Abraham Kotto took a job in the construction industry and married Gladys Maria, a Catholic army nurse of Panamanian descent. The couple had a son on November 15, 1944, and named him Yaphet, which means "beautiful" in Hebrew. Yaphet was three when his parents divorced. He lived with his maternal grandparents in the Bronx and attended Catholic school at the behest of his mother, who was often called away by the service. "We were the only black family in the neighborhood," he told the New York Times, "and I was about the only black kid at St. Augustine's School. It was still all Irish in those days and I wasn't as big as I am now, just a skinny kid. But I never had any trouble."
Growing up, Kotto watched the New York Yankees from a roof overlooking Yankee Stadium. He celebrated the Christian holidays with his mother and her family, but he also studied Torah with his father and was bar mitzvahed. In 1994 he told People: "To this day I open books from the back, having read the Torah so much."
Kotto became fascinated with the acting field as an adolescent; he claims to have empathized with on-screen characters who were spurned or rejected. When he saw the 1954 classic On the Waterfront, he easily related to Marlon Brando's role as a misfit. "He seemed so defiant," Kotto explained to People. "He really couldn't express his feelings to the girl. It reminded me of my relationships with black girls." The actor further revealed: "Black girls told me I was ugly because of my dark skin, thick lips and broad nose." In an Entertainment Tonight interview, he confided, "They called me too black" and "jungle bunny." But a chance meeting with Malcolm X on the streets of New York City helped Kotto to see the beauty of his blackness.
Kotto decided to become an actor after seeing The Defiant Ones, a 1958 film starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as a pair of escaped convicts. His parents were not happy about his decision. "My father and mother were very ambitious for me," he told the New York Times. "My father was all the time asking me, what did you accomplish today? When I told him I wanted to be an actor, he was really angry."
Despite parental disapproval, Kotto quickly made his presence known in the business. His first acting job was playing Shakespeare's Othello at a summer theater in Cape Cod. He did several Off-Broadway and Broadway shows and in 1965 he made his film debut in the portrait of oppressed blacks, Nothing But a Man. Soon he was making regular guest appearances on weekly television shows such as Hawaii Five-O, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke.
By the time the "blaxploitation" phenomena of black action pictures hit Hollywood in the early 1970s, Kotto was already playing the big, tough black character he would portray for much of his career. His role as a militant in the 1970 action flick The Liberation of L. B. Jones marked the first time that a black man killed a white man on screen. And in 1973, he played a ruthless Caribbean diplomat and master criminal in the James Bond thriller Live and Let Die. But while Kotto profited from the black cinema explosion of the early and mid-1970s, he refrained from playing the types of negative black characters so common in many of the blaxploitation dramas. "One thing I'm proud of," he told the New York Times, "is that I turned down every black exploitation film I was ever offered except one, ?1974's? Truck Turner.... From my own experience, I know how influential movies can be on kids."
In 1963 Kotto married Rita Dittman, a German immigrant. The couple had three children before divorcing in 1975. That same year, Kotto married a flight attendant named Toni Pettyjohn. He had met Pettyjohn at Pacific Palisades, California's Self- Realization Fellowship Temple, a church that draws from the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita, an Indian text.
Throughout the mid-1970s, Kotto was still taking roles in low budget pictures such as the 1975 skin-diving drama, Sharks' Treasure, which he called "one of the most embarrassing things I ever did," according to the Washington Times. But he also began to get roles in bigger budget productions. Also in 1975, he appeared with Michael Moriarity in the cops and corruption film Report to the Commissioner. By the later '70s, Kotto was appearing solely in more mainstream productions. Directors saw a certain, undefinable quality in him and often cast him as "an ordinary sort of guy who could not be brushed aside, who would not accept hypocrisy and who would always maintain a clear-eyed perceptiveness about the do's and don'ts of survival," according to Bogle.
Kotto played Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 1977 television production Raid on Entebbe, but his breakthrough came in 1978 when Paul Schrader cast him in the feature film Blue Collar as "Smokey," a swinging black bachelor and ex-con who is killed because he won't be bought off by the mob. Andrew Sarris commented in the Village Voice that Kotto played Smokey "with picture stealing force and charm."
The New York Times complimented his "sheer presence" and "his cool, self-assured performance." And Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker: "His burly, gentle Smokey is pleasure-loving, loyal to his friends, innocent, and deep. And the blending of the latter two qualities seem so natural that it becomes plausible that the [mob] bosses have to destroy him--he's a saint."
Blue Collar was followed by roles in Ridley Scott's 1979 spaceborn thrillfest Alien and Stuart Rosenberg's Brubaker, a 1980 prison drama starring Robert Redford as a warden who attempts to reform a Southern jail. Kotto claimed his place in the Hollywood mainstream with these roles, but he was unable to fully change the system of typecasting. The tough-guy roles continued in the 1980 television presentation Rage and in motion pictures like Fighting Back, released in 1982. The next year, Kotto played the cop who puts together the pieces of the mystery in Peter Hyams's courtroom drama The Star Chamber, starring Michael Douglas as a young judge bent on straightening out a twisted justice system.
By the second half of the 1980s, Kotto was taking some questionable parts, perhaps because he had six children to support. In the 1986 miniseries Harem, he was cast as a eunuch and was "done in by the ridiculousness of the role," noted Bogle. The bad roles continued into 1987, when he played a police lieutenant who couldn't do anything right in the cop and prostitute mystery, Prettykill. New York Times reviewer Walter Goodman called the movie "foolishly put together" and wrote that Kotto was "all wrong" in the part.
In 1990--following a supporting part in Martin Brest's 1988 action-comedy hit, Midnight Run, with Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin--Kotto returned to theater work after an absence of nearly two decades. His last appearance had been in 1970 when he replaced acclaimed actor James Earl Jones in the role of heavyweight fighter Jack Johnson in the Broadway production of The Great White Hope. But Kotto did not simply copy Jones's interpretation of Johnson's character; instead, he forged "his own vivid, explosive portrayal that ... met with popular and critical acclaim," according to the Washington Times.
Playing Troy Maxson in the 1990 staging of August Wilson's play Fences, Kotto again replaced James Earl Jones--and again made the part his own. The role of Maxson, a former Negro League baseball player trying to keep his family together, was not an easy one for Kotto. Unlike the cops and tough guys he had been playing for years, Maxson was emotional and sometimes helpless. "Here was a man who has this image on the screen of being someone who could just rip off people's heads and fight with an alien," director Tazewell Thompson told the Washington Times. "And then to see him just literally sit in a corner of the set unable to move. It was so difficult for him."
In 1993 Kotto returned to the police beat as Lieutenant Giardello in the television drama Homicide, one of several trendy urban cop series that scored well with critics in the early '90s. "Giardello's thought of as a black Italian," Entertainment Weekly wrote, "but what's more important is the dignity and positive image that he affords. He's a meaningful character, and you really don't have too many meaningful characters on television." Executive producer Barry Levinson told People, "Yaphet has great credibility, a simple strength, a quiet passion." And the Washington Times wrote that as Giardello, Kotto "carries himself like a scuffed-up Sisyphus [the mythological god of futility], knowing he and his detectives have an impossible task in the drab urban chaos."
While Kotto is proud of his success he says he can't watch himself on the screen. "It takes a strange ego to sit there and watch yourself, applauding your own performance," he told the Baltimore Sun. "I just can't do that. I would find too many flaws."
As of early 1994, Kotto was working on a revision of his autobiography, The Royalty, which was first published in 1990. The book deals with his early life and details his relation to Cameroonian and English nobility. He began writing the book while filming Alien. "Setting up lights on that set would take six or seven hours," he told the Sun. "There was nothing to do so I started thinking about writing it." Kotto wants his book to break stereotypes about life in Africa. He was quoted in an Associated Press wire report as saying that he hopes to raise the consciousness and pride of young people of color by documenting his heritage--telling the story of an African family that didn't "wear grass skirts" or "walk around naked," but rather "lived in palaces."
Further Reading
Books
- Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Film and Television: An Encyclopedia, Garland Publishing, 1988.
- Kotto, Yaphet, The Royalty, White Loitus, Inc., 1990.
- Entertainment Weekly, February 5, 1993, p. 28.
- New Yorker, February 10, 1975; February 27, 1978, p. 84; July 7, 1980, p. 90.
- New York Times, February 10, 1978, p. C5; May 25, 1979, p. C16; March 27, 1987, p. C13; July 20, 1988, p. C15.
- People, January 31, 1994, pp. 67-69.
- San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 1993.
- Sun (Baltimore), February 10, 1993.
- Village Voice, February 27, 1978, p. 32; August 23, 1983, p. 49.
- Washington Times, January 31, 1983; May 10, 1990.
- Additional information for this profile was taken from an interview broadcast on Entertainment Tonight, January 8, 1994, and an Associated Press release dated March 4, 1994.
— Jordan Wankoff
