John Amos was a groundbreaking, calming presence on screen and elsewhere

It is unusual that more than a month passed before the death of 84-year-old actor John Amos was announced on Tuesday. But a strong personality takes a while to come to a standstill.

A Golden Gloves champion, college football player and minor league football player before moving into entertainment – first as a stand-up performer in Greenwich Village, then as a writer for Leslie Uggams' variety show in 1969 and eventually to the big screen – Amos was created to play authority figures (or anti-authority figures). His roles over the course of his long, busy career included Reverend, Inspector, Captain, Sergeant, Doctor, Trainer, Sheriff, Pastor, Mayor, Deacon and most notably Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 22 episodes of “The West Wing.” “, prestige television before the letter. (When Amos met then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Powell's first words to him were: “Percy Fitzwallace? What kind of name is that for a brother?”)

Even “Gordy the Weatherman,” as many of us first knew Amos, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was spot on. “Gordy was well-spoken,” Amos recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist (and not a sportscaster), because that implies the man could think about Xs and Oes.” (To call it a running joke would be to mistake him for a sportscaster. )

John Amos in 2007. He was known for his roles on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and the “Good Times” spinoff “Maude.”

(Nick Ut/Associated Press)

And of course, in the role for which he is probably best known, he played a father – not the comical jerk whose children are all smarter than him, but a caring, responsible and strict figure where it counted. Amos was only 34 years old when he was cast as James Evans Sr. in the 1974 “Maude” spinoff “Good Times” – reflecting his innate maturity, he was 19 years younger than Esther Rolle, who played his wife . (He had played a version of this role in a few episodes of Maude.)

In true Norman Lear style, loud, frantic moments and outbursts of rage alternated with quiet, thoughtful, more emotional moments, like in The Honeymooners, but with commentary on class and race. It demonstrated the actor's range, but Amos began to sour on the show when he felt the focus shift to the quietly comic antics of Jimmie Walker as the looser son JJ – “Dyn-o-mite!” you remember maybe – and said it: “I wasn't the most diplomatic guy back then,” he said in the same Academy interview. Eventually, “the writers got tired of their lives being threatened over jokes,” and after the third season, Lear let him go. James died off-screen.

But “Roots” was just around the corner; As an older version of LeVar Burton's Kunta Kinte, it entered the history books and opened the door to dramatic roles.

Because of the time in which he was born, Amos was something of a pioneer. He was one of the few black students to integrate his elementary and middle school in New Jersey, where he was asked if he had a dick. He married his first wife, Noel J. Mickelson, the mother of his two children, who was white, in 1965, two years before the Loving v. Virginia decision in which the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage. And he started out as an actor at a time when it was harder for black actors to get substantial roles and the idea of ​​casting colorblind actors was still a distant prospect.

John Amos in 1989 when he starred in “Twelfth Night” at New York's Central Park Theater.

(Rene Perez/Associated Press)

The stage, meanwhile, allowed him to perform the works of Athol Fugard (“Master Harold” … and the Boys” in Detroit) and Eugene O’Neill (a touring “The Emperor Jones” in the role created by Paul Robeson). , August Wilson (“Fences” in Albany) and Shakespeare (Sir Toby Belch in a 1989 production of “Twelfth Night” for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park, opposite Andre Braugher, LisaGay Hamilton, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gregory Hines). In 1990, he created his own one-man show, Halley's Comet, in which he played a man looking through the century, and which he toured with as recently as 2017.

Between highlights, his career traces the familiar mold of an actor who goes where the work goes, including a reunion with Norman Lear in the short-lived “704 Hauser,” about a black family moving into Archie Bunker's old home; recurring roles on the UPN Debbie Allen-LL Cool J sitcom “In the House” and the CBS crime drama “The District”; and the NBC crime drama “Hunter.” There have been many, many guest shots on The Love Boat and The A-Team, to 30 Rock and The Righteous Gemstones. On the big screen, among many forgotten films, were well-known roles in Eddie Murphy's Coming to America and an appearance as himself in Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems.

For him, television was most important. Perhaps my favorite Amos role was as bush pilot Buzz Washington in the 2006 Anne Heche comedy Men in Trees, set in Alaska. Married for ten years to mail-order bride Mai (Lauren Tom), who could be a handful, he emphasized the gentleness that underlay his best roles; He could be a calming presence on screen. Powerful people don't have to shout to be heard, and are more powerful because of it.