YAPHET KOTTO

(15 November 1939 - 14 March 2021)

The American actor Yaphet Kotto may well be best-remembered for playing Kananga, the first black villain in a James Bond film. It was Live and Let Die (1973) and was Kotto’s first substantial role, although he had been in films from Nothing But a Man in 1964. He was in TV series including Tarzan, The Big Valley and Bonanza before his second film, Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, which was followed by Henry Hathaway’s 5 Card Stud and William Wyler’s The Liberation of L.B. Jones. He was the star of Larry Cohen’s Dial Rat and appeared as a motorcycle cop in The Limit, which he also directed, and he also played a cop in Across 110th Street. Kotto, who has died at the age of 81 in the Phillipines, was born in New York to a businessman/construction worker father and a nurse/army officer mother. After his parents split when Yaphet was just three, he was brought up by his grandmother in the Bronx. His aunt ran a dance school at which Marlon Brando was a student. Inspired by Brando, Kotto took up acting, making his stage debut as Othello in 1958. After joining the Actors’ Studio he began to get parts in films, often playing authority figures including many police officers. He appeared in a number of films such as Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, Ridley Scott’s Alien (as the chief engineer Dennis Parker), Stuart Rosenberg’s Brubaker, and had the title role in Liz White's all-black Othello (1980). He was with Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man, with Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, and with Robert Englund in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. His later career was a mixture of action films and TV shows such as For Love and Honour, 1914-1918, Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999). He turned down roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Yaphet Kotto was married to Rita Dittman, Antoinette Pettyjohn and Tessie Sinahon. He has four daughters, Natasha, Sarada, Mirabai and Salina, and two sons, Fred and Robert.

MICHAEL DARVELL