For the opening scene of Shaft – the 1971 film that helped inaugurate the “blaxploitation” genre and spawned an Oscar-winning song in Isaac Hayes’s call-and-response classic Theme from Shaft – the director Gordon Parks mapped out to the actor Richard Roundtree exactly what would happen.
Roundtree – playing the New York detective John Shaft who “won’t cop out when there’s danger all about” as the song puts it – was to stride out of the subway near Times Square, tracked by assorted cameras positioned opposite him and at high angles. “I want you to walk across 42nd Street,” Parks said. “And I want you to own it.”
Own it he did. In his beige turtleneck and brown leather trench coat, Roundtree swaggers and weaves through the hubbub, looking bemused at a demonstration going on around him (which was nothing to do with the film itself but a real-life protest by the Gay Activists Alliance) and improvising the moment when he raises his middle finger at an impatient cabbie. “I did own it,” he reflected. “Much better than I could ever have imagined.”
It was the first major screen appearance for Roundtree, who has died aged 81 of pancreatic cancer, and the one that defined him for the rest of his life. He was cast after a meeting with Parks, a former photojournalist, who showed him a magazine advertisement and said: “We’re kind of looking for a guy who looks like this.” Serendipitously, it was an ad featuring Roundtree himself.
In optioning Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 novel, in which Shaft is hired to rescue a gangster’s kidnapped daughter, MGM had considered making the characters white. But Parks defended the novel’s vision, including its acute awareness of Black culture. He wanted audiences “to see the Black guy winning”.
That single-mindedness paid off, saving the troubled studio from bankruptcy. “Ghetto kids were coming downtown to see their hero, Shaft, and here was a Black man on the screen they didn’t have to be ashamed of,” the director said in 1972. “We need movies about the history of our people, yes, but we need heroic fantasies about our people, too. We all need a little James Bond now and then.”
John Shaft was suave and uncompromising, free to dispense justice his own way, and cut from a snazzier cloth than the nobler roles for which African-American stars such as Sidney Poitier were known. In 2000, the critic Elvis Mitchell noted that Roundtree’s “on-screen relish, which was itself a kind of dynamism, connected to an audience hunger. And he held the screen like an aristocrat.” Mitchell compared him to Sean Connery, identifying “the same outsize wellspring of charm and virility, but with a leavening … sense of self-deprecation”.
He did many of his own stunts. “We could get close with our helicopter shots because you could see it really was Roundtree and not a stunt driver,” said Parks. “We spent 12 days on that chase, and wrecked four cars, two boats and a mock-up chopper.”
The actor returned for two sequels, Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), which was also directed by Parks, and Shaft in Africa (1973), which, regrettably, was not. After a brief Shaft TV series in the same year, which Roundtree described as “an ugly point in my long, illustrious career”, he was done with John Shaft. For now.
Born in New Rochelle, New York, to Kathryn (nee Watkins), a cook and housekeeper, and John Roundtree, a refuse collector and later church minister, Richard attended New Rochelle high school and won a football scholarship to Southern Illinois University. After working at Barneys department store, he modelled clothes and became one of the stars of the Ebony Fashion Fair, a touring spin-off of Ebony magazine. He then joined the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City and starred in its 1967 production of The Great White Hope.
Capitalising on the heat from Shaft, he joined Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in the disaster movie Earthquake (1974), played the title character in Man Friday (1975) opposite Peter O’Toole as Robinson Crusoe, and appeared as a rakish carriage driver in the slavery-era TV drama Roots (1977).
In between TV series, including most recently Family Reunion on Netflix, he was in the action comedy City Heat (1984), set during the Depression and starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, the gruesome serial-killer hit Seven (1995) alongside Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, the Disney comedy George of the Jungle (1997) and Rian Johnson’s witty neo-noir thriller Brick (2005).
Having declined various Shaft-related offers, he finally relented and appeared in John Singleton’s reboot, Shaft (2000), with Samuel L Jackson as his nephew. He returned for a misguided comic riff on the franchise, also called Shaft (2019), which revealed that Jackson’s character was in fact his son, and brought in a new generation in the form of a sensitive, gun-hating grandson.
“Everybody wanted to be you for a very long time,” Jackson told Roundtree in a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “You defined what cool was – you had the look, the walk, the attitude.”
Pigeonholed by the part in the 1970s, Roundtree finally made peace with it. “Sometimes it’s much easier to ride the horse in the direction that it’s going,” he said.
He was married and divorced twice, to Mary Jane Grant, then Karen Ciernia. He is survived by two daughters, Kelli and Nicole, from his first marriage, and two daughters, Tayler and Morgan, and a son, John, from his second.
• Richard Arnold Roundtree, actor, born 9 July 1942; died 24 October 2023
