The death of Hollywood star Yaphet Kotto has been announced, one of the actors who broke down barriers for African American performers in the 1970s. He started on the screen in small roles - The Thomas Crown Affair, Five Card Stud - before his obvious talent began to secure him more substantial work, and within a couple of years of the 1970s beginning (after films like Dial Rat and Across 110th Street) he hit the big time as the villain in James Bond movie Live and Let Die, one of the best bad guys the franchise ever saw.
After that, one feels he should have graduated to more blockbusters, but the landscape of Hollywood was different then, and he appeared in blaxploitation like Truck Turner, Friday Foster, Drum and The Monkey Hu$tle. Higher profile roles beckoned like Blue Collar, Alien, Brubaker, a lead in Othello, but thereafter he settled into supporting roles on television and occasional movies like The Running Man, Midnight Run and Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. However, his career had a second wind when he starred in cop show hit Homicide: Life on the Street, which is what he is best known for on TV. Latterly growing eccentric, claiming to be a descendent of Queen Victoria and therefore a member of the British Royal Family (though he did have African royal blood), his profile lowered in the last twenty years, but his impact was an important one.
