Obituary: Professional and personal fulfilment for proud Roots star John Amos

John Amos played the slave Kunta Kinte in the award-winning television miniseries Roots, which helped to combat racism in America.

Actor John Amos, who played the slave Kunta Kinta in the legendary television series Roots.

John Amos’s portrayal of a slave in Roots reached living rooms in America that Martin Luther King never had.

The miniseries’ enormous success when it was broadcast in 1977 was poetic justice for the actor and writer. He had recently been sacked from groundbreaking sitcom Good Times, about an African-American family, after complaining of racially stereotyped scripts.

A year later, the Golden Globe and multiple Emmy award-winning adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family was watched by some 130 million Americans. Amos played the role of the adult Kunta Kinte, who as a young warrior in what is now the Gambia is captured by slavers in 1750, brought to Maryland and builds a family dynasty on a plantation despite the harsh injustices and indignities of slavery and racism.

“I never cared after Roots if I ever did anything in the industry again,” said the former footballer who had started in Hollywood as a comedy writer in the late 1960s. “I felt this is it, this is as good as it’s going to get. It was the culmination of all of the misconceptions and stereotypical roles that I had lived and seen being offered to me. It was like a reward for having suffered those indignities.”

Amos was already a well-known face from three series of Good Times, playing the patriarch of an African-American family living in “the projects” in Chicago and struggling to make ends meet. In a grittier premise than The Cosby Show later on, Amos played James Evans Sr, a perennially unemployed father of three who picks up any odd job he can find to pay the rent. He suffers plenty of knock-backs, but is a diligent if long-suffering husband and father. And in greeting the antics of his children with a wisecrack or a withering stare, he proved to be an everyman dad. “Young men of every ethnicity imaginable came up to me and said, ‘You’re the dad I never had’. America loved that show.”

Yet Amos was unhappy. The show was written by white men who Amos said did not understand the African-American community and wrote stereotypically. He hated the increased emphasis on his more buffoonish screen son, JJ, with his chicken hat and catchphrase “Dy-no-mite”, which Amos felt played into black minstrel tropes.

He wanted more storylines for the two other children who aspired to good jobs, arguing that if the writing was subtle enough they could still get laughs. “I felt just as much emphasis and mileage could have been gotten out of my other two children, one of whom (Ralph Carter) aspired to become a Supreme Court justice and the other (Bern Nadette Stanis) a surgeon.”

Good Times rated well until the sixth and final series in 1979, but Amos had left abruptly after the third. Reading the latest scripts, he raged at executive producer Norman Lear, “How long have you been black?”, attributing his anger and lack of diplomacy to the PTSD he developed as a boxer and footballer. “That just doesn’t happen in the (African-American) community. We don’t think that way. We don’t act that way. We don’t let our children do that.” Amos was sacked and written out of the show, killed in a road accident in the first episode of the fourth series.

During these years Amos went to Liberia on several occasions to research his family tree and absorb the culture. On one visit he stayed for several months and cultivated the accent in the hopes that he would need it one day for an acting role. While he was drinking home brew with some friends in an illegal bar, a man approached wielding a machete and threatened to kill him. He had mistaken Amos for a security guard who had mistreated him.

Amos dropped the accent, pulled out his American passport and sealed a friendship with his potential assailant over several home brews. When Amos was reading for the part of Kunta Kinte and his African accent was questioned, he begged to differ: “That accent was good enough to nearly get me killed.”

After his sporting career, Amos turned to creative writing and performing, which he had first been encouraged to try by a teacher who saw his potential. Arriving in Los Angeles, he failed to make it as a comedian but began to pick up small writing jobs.

The commissions got bigger, including writing sketches about an African-American family in Harlem that featured on The Leslie Uggams Show in 1969, the first American variety show with a black host. One of his first acting roles was as Gordy the weatherman in The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970, the affable straight man to the chaos all about him. His film breakthrough came a year later with roles in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and cult road movie Vanishing Point.

Work flowed after Roots with numerous film roles including one as a fast-food entrepreneur in the hit Eddie Murphy vehicle, Coming to America (1988). Amos gleaned no little satisfaction from the fact his first screen association with hamburgers was playing a dancing operative sweeping the floors in an advert for McDonald’s in 1971, singing: “Grab a bucket and mop, scrub the bottom and top!”

Amos never lost his love of writing. During a fallow period in the ’90s he wrote a one-man play about an old man reflecting on the state of the world as he waits in the woods for his second coming of Halley’s comet. He took the play on tour all around the world.

His career revived in 1999 when he was cast in one of his favourite roles as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, in The West Wing. “He had the opportunity to address institutional grievances – but he never had to raise his voice,” he said.

He conceded that Roots was as good as his career would bet, but he was not complaining. “I saw my country (had) finally reached a point where it’s ready to look at its past and say, yes, we did this, and some of these things were terrible.”

John Amos, actor and writer. Born in New Jersey December 27, 1939; died, aged 84, on August 21.

The Times