Before Michael Jordan and Julius Erving, there was Elgin Baylor. Before Venus and Serena Williams, there was Althea Gibson. And before Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Foxx, there was Richard Roundtree, the Shaft star who blazed a trail for an entire generation of black action movie stars who followed in his wake. His influence can be felt not only in several of Jackson’s and Foxx’s signature roles but in some of Quentin Tarantino’s most adrenaline-charged movies as well.
Roundtree, who died this week in Los Angeles at the age of 81, was born in New Rochelle, New York, on July 9, 1942. His path to acting fame was anything but straightforward. A talented high school athlete, Roundtree was awarded a football scholarship by Southern Illinois University but soon thereafter gave up what might have been a promising sports career so that he could try his hand at modeling. After landing a few premium photo shoots, Roundtree — acting on the advice of a few pivotal figures he encountered at that point in his life, such as Bill Cosby — decided to pursue a career in movies and television. After gaining acceptance into the Negro Ensemble Company and performing several supporting parts for the stage, his first major acting credits came from his portrayal of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, in a theatrical production of The Great White Hope in 1967. Roundtree only barely missed out on major renown at this point; a Broadway adaptation of The Great White Hope, produced a year later but starring James Earl Jones instead of Roundtree, would help catapult Jones to stardom.
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Roundtree, though, did not need to wait too long for his turn to shine. While continuing to act in off-Broadway stage productions of The Great White Hope, Roundtree found out about an open audition that the director Gordon Parks was holding for his next movie. Roundtree traveled to the audition and so impressed Parks with his “too cool for school” (in Roundtree’s words) interpretation of the lead character that Parks ended up choosing Roundtree. Parks’s choice of Roundtree to play the protagonist in his 1971 film Shaft affected American movies for decades to come. In interpreting the New York City private detective John Shaft as not only a suave, street-smart sleuth but as a dauntless and powerful forger of his own destiny who wasn’t afraid of any situation and who didn’t back down in the face of anyone, Roundtree helped make Shaft into a cultural sensation, had a major hand in creating the Blaxploitation film genre, and was even credited with saving MGM studios from bankruptcy. Going where not even Sidney Poitier had gone before, Roundtree’s Shaft was the first unapologetically audacious black movie character and the first great black action movie star. With his dynamism, endless charisma, sex appeal, astuteness, and apparent invincibility, Roundtree’s Shaft embodied coolness for a generation of American film lovers.
Like Jason Alexander with George Costanza and Mark Hamill with Luke Skywalker, Roundtree came to be identified with a single (albeit iconic) role despite having a far more eclectic acting career than the typical Hollywood one-hit wonder. In addition to reprising his role as John Shaft in several movie and TV sequels, Roundtree appeared in shows and movies as varied as Roots, Se7en, Alias, and Desperate Housewives. Roundtree at one point had become somewhat resentful of not having received the recognition that he thought he deserved for the dramatic range that he had demonstrated in his impressively diverse movies and TV roles until some sage words from his father changed his perspective for the rest of his life. “Son, let me tell you something,” Roundtree recounts his father saying to him. “A lot of people leave this Earth not being known for anything. Shut up.”
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.