Richard Roundtree, the American actor widely seen as one of the first black action heroes, died on Tuesday after a short battle with pancreatic cancer.
"Richard's work and career served as a turning point for African American leading men in film," his manager, Patrick McMinn, told The Hollywood Reporter. "The impact he had on the industry cannot be overstated."
Roundtree was best-known for his career-defining role as private detective John Shaft in Gordon Parks' Shaft (1971) and in its four spin-off films: cool, confident and street-smart, Shaft was, as Roundtree explained in a 1972 New York Times article, “a Black man who is for once a winner". A smooth operator, Shaft was a ladies man who got straight to the point: "I got to feelin' like a machine. That's no way to feel. Come here, baby," was just one of his lines of seduction.
Although Roundtree was best-known, and loved, for Shaft, he had a fantastic, six decade-long career: he acted in 76 films between 1971 and 2022, starring with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in Earthquake (1974), with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in City Heat (1984), opposite Peter O’Toole in Man Friday (1975), alongside Laurence Olivier in war drama Inchon (1981) and with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt in Se7en (1995). More recently he had roles in Desperate Housewives” (2004), What Men Want (2019) and Haunting of the Mary Celeste (2020).
He underwent a double mastectomy in 1993 after being diagnosed with breast cancer: “Breast cancer is not gender specific,” Roundtree said in 1997. "Men have this cavalier attitude about health issues. I got such positive feedback because I spoke out about it. I’m a survivor.”
Born in New Rochelle in New York in 1942 to a cook and a butler working in the same household, Roundtree earned a football scholarship to attend Southern Illinois University but dropped out in 1963, half way through his degree, after a successful summer of modelling with Ebony Fashion Fair. Modelling lead to theatre acting, but it was really a twist of fate that Roundtree was cast as Shaft: Gordon Parks spotted Roundtree modelling, rather than acting, and thought he would be perfect for the role.
"The passing of Richard Roundtree is a real blow," said Samuel L. Jackson on X. "Loved being around him, learning, working, laughing & feeling Blessed to have an idol live up to who I expected him to be!! Thanks for making us feel REAL GOOD about ourselves!"
The passing of Richard Roundtree is a real blow. Loved being around him, learning, working, laughing & feeling Blessed to have an idol live up to who I expected him to be!! Thanks for making us feel REAL GOOD about ourselves!
— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) October 25, 2023
Rest In Power‼️‼️‼️👊🏾👊🏾👊🏾🤎🤎 pic.twitter.com/yQq6SXyn9K
Here is our pick of some of Roundtree's best-ever roles to watch to celebrate the acting star's brilliant career.
Shaft (1971)
"What we were doing was a good, old Saturday afternoon shoot 'em up," said Roundtree about the Shaft films, speaking in 2000. In the first film, which launched Roundtree's acting career, suave detective John Shaft has been hired by a crime lord to try and track down his kidnapped daughter. Shaft slinks around New York City, meeting ladies and cutting deals.
"Shaft was living the Playboy magazine reader’s dream, with beautiful women available to him as willing, downright grateful, sex partners. Some called him, for better or worse, the Black James Bond," said The New York Times.
The film was one of the first of the first of the Blaxploitation movies that changed Hollywood in the Seventies: these were films in which black actors, for the first time, played charismatic leading characters rather than expendable sidekicks or victims. It was the "first picture to show a Black man who leads a life free from racial torment," said film critic Maurice Peterson in Essence magazine.
The film also became known for its excellent theme song: Isaac Hayes' Theme from Shaft was everything one would hope from a Seventies New York action film soundtrack: smooth, groovy, and with an early disco rhythm, the song, which has lyrics that include "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?" and "They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother..." won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1972, making Hayes the first African American to receive the prize.
Shaft in Africa (1973)
Roundtree then returned to play Shaft in Shaft's Big Score! (1972) – though we prefer the 1973 sequel, Shaft in Africa. Now that the film was no longer a financial gamble, and with the famous French-British director John Guillermin (King Kong) behind the camera, this was Shaft literally bringing out the big guns, with scenes that included speedboats, helicopters, and even more fabulously beautiful women. The story followed Shaft as he went undercover in Africa to find and expose a smuggling ring.
Roots (1977)
Roots was a seminal ABC miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It told the story of Kunta Kinte (who was played by both John Amos and LeVar Burton) an African man who was captured and taken to North America as a slave. With a rollcall of big names, including Maya Angelou, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Madge Sinclair and Vic Morrow, the series was nominated for 37 Primetime Emmy Awards and won nine.
Roundtree played carriage driver Sam Bennett in the acclaimed show. In an ABC special celebrating 25 years since its release, Roundtree explained its power: “You got a sense of white Americans saying, ‘Damn, that really happened'."
Se7en (1995)
Few films have seen director David Fincher more in his element than Se7en, a sick psychological thriller about a serial killer whose murders are conducted along the theme of the seven deadly sins. Roundtree played district attorney Martin Talbot in this Oscar-nominated stomach-churner starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Once Upon a Time … When We Were Colored (1996)
This period drama which starred Al Freeman Jr., Phylicia Rashad and Leon Robinson, followed the life of a young boy growing up in Mississippi in 1946, when racial segregation was still being legally enforced in the South. Composer Isaac Hayes featured as Preacher Hurn, while Roundtree played Cleve, an iceman, who runs into difficulty after a white ice company takes over his usual route and there's nothing he can do about it.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Once Upon a Time… was the film Roundtree was most proud of: it was the first film that his father, who became a Pentecostal minister later in his life, had ever seen – apparently he had refused to see any of his son's previous films.
Shaft (2019)
Shaft's character was so well-loved that the films were revisited in both 2000 and 2019, with Samuel L. Jackson playing Shaft's energetic nephew, John Shaft, who is also a unruly detective. Despite neither iteration doing particularly brilliantly with the critics (to say the least – they pulled in 67 per cent and 34 per cent Rotten Tomato scores respectively), there was something truly joyful about Jackson continuing the legacy of the iconic films. The lines were just as bawdy, too, with Jackson at one point saying, "It's my duty to please that booty".
In both, Roundtree returned to play his original part, and people heralded him for it. In Shaft (2019) although now a white-bearded grandfather, he was described by Variety as "a character who’s hotter, and cooler, than anyone around him" with a spirit that was "spry and tougher than leather".
