John Amos, actor in groundbreaking TV roles, dies at 84

He played the stoic patriarch in “Good Times” and the adult Kunta Kinte in the miniseries “Roots.” He was also a fast-food entrepreneur in “Coming to America.”

John Amos, a running back turned actor who appeared in scores of TV shows — including groundbreaking 1970s programs such as the sitcom “Good Times” and the epic miniseries “Roots” — and risked his career to protest demeaning portrayals of Black characters, died Aug. 21 in Los Angeles. He was 84.

The talent agency Buchwald, which represented him, announced the death but did not provide a specific cause.

After being cut by 13 professional and semipro football teams in his 20s, often because of injuries, Mr. Amos supported himself variously as a ditch-digger, lumberjack, restaurant manager, social worker and advertising copywriter. With a self-confessed short fuse and a flair for showmanship, he found an outlet for his frustration and creativity writing jokes that he performed in nightclubs.

He enjoyed the applause and, he later said, found that being onstage “allowed me to be other people without getting in trouble.”

Settling in Los Angeles, he tried to break into TV by pitching ideas for comic sketches. “I’d go in when I first started in the business, trying to get a job as a writer, and they’d see a Black guy with 19-inch neck,” he recalled to Newsday. The reaction he got, he said, was, “What the hell could you know about comedy?”

His breakthrough came in 1969, when he became one of the first African Americans to write on staff for a network program (CBS’s “The Leslie Uggams Show”). Having impressed executives with his comic timing, he soon began performing on camera.

In the popular Eddie Murphy movie comedy “Coming to America” (1988), Mr. Amos was the self-important fast-food restaurant owner who insists that his McDowell’s — home of the “Big Mick” sandwich and the “Golden Arcs” — is not a copy of McDonald’s because “my buns have no seeds.”

He played a brutal prison guard in the Sylvester Stallone film “Lock Up” (1989) and a renegade Special Forces officer in the Bruce Willis action hit “Die Hard 2” (1990). But by the end of his career, he was best known for his steady run of TV roles.

His career was at times hindered by his admittedly “hardheaded” disposition, which he traced to his upbringing in New Jersey by a single mother who taught him to stand up for himself as he helped integrate classrooms in the 1940s and 1950s. During his years in Hollywood, he campaigned for acting opportunities for Black actors beyond the pimps and drug pushers they were often consigned to play.

In 1970, he landed a recurring guest spot as Gordy the weatherman on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” the acclaimed CBS sitcom set in a Minneapolis TV station. He said he was grateful that the writers did not typecast him as a sportscaster but instead presented him as a dapper, self-assured meteorologist who, as Mr. Amos put it, “could think beyond X’s and O’s.”

His career received another boost in 1973 when producer Norman Lear cast Mr. Amos as the underemployed husband of Maude Findlay’s maid — played by Esther Rolle — on the sitcom “Maude,” which had Bea Arthur in the title role.

Conflict over ‘Good Times’

The next year, he and Rolle starred in a spinoff, “Good Times,” also developed by Lear, which aired on CBS until 1979. The show was considered a breakthrough for its portrayal of a loving two-parent Black family — headed by James and Florida Evans — trying to make ends meet while living in a high-rise housing project in Chicago.

“I was carrying the weight of being the first Black father of a complete family,” Mr. Amos told the website Vulture in 2015, “and I carried that responsibility seriously. Maybe too much so. … I knew that millions of Black people were watching. I knew that my own father was watching. My own children were watching. And I was not going to portray something that was less than redeeming.”

Amid traditional sitcom high jinks, the show addressed gang violence and teen pregnancy, among other social issues. But Mr. Amos routinely clashed with the all-White writing staff, and with Lear, over what he considered the dilution of serious topical matters to focus on the antics of his fast-talking screen son J.J., played by the wiry comedian Jimmie Walker.

Mr. Amos found the emphasis on Walker’s silly strut and wardrobe, “dy-no-mite” catch phrase and shady, get-rich-quick schemes offensive. He contended that more attention should have been paid to his character’s two other children, who aspired to be a doctor and a lawyer. He and Rolle, reportedly aghast at Walker’s breakout stardom and the example he set for Black youths, had little on-set interaction with him.

Mr. Amos, who had angrily protested the show’s direction, was fired by Lear over the phone in 1976, and the James Evans character was killed off in a car accident. The writers, Mr. Amos recalled decades later, “got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes.”

Soon after departing “Good Times,” Mr. Amos was cast as the adult Kunta Kinte on “Roots,” the landmark 1977 ABC miniseries. The TV show, based on Alex Haley’s best-selling book of the same name, traces the impact of slavery on a Black family across generations.

The production ran eight nights and reached 130 million viewers, making it one of the highest-rated programs in television history. “Roots” provided a rare high-profile dramatic outlet for Black actors, including LeVar Burton (as the younger Kunta Kinte), Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson and Ben Vereen. It swept the Emmy Awards, and Mr. Amos received a nomination for his role.

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But the performance did not translate into bigger or better roles for him. He turned down a part in “Roots: The Next Generations” (1979), saying that contemporizing the story reduced the characters to soap-opera figures. He declined other roles he found stereotyped or degrading. He preferred to wait, he told the San Francisco Examiner, “for the chance to do things I could be proud of.”

Starting in 1984, he spent a year playing the hard-driving police captain on the NBC drama “Hunter” opposite Fred Dryer, but he again ran into conflicts with producers. Mr. Amos argued that his character — a Black role model — should be calmly in control, not the angry man the writers had envisioned.

He later worked on the sitcoms “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “In the House.” Having smoothed over his differences with Lear, Mr. Amos starred in the producer’s short-lived sitcom “704 Houser” (1994) about an auto mechanic whose liberal political views put him at odds with an arch-conservative son who is dating a White woman.

Over the next two decades, Mr. Amos had recurring roles as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on “The West Wing,” the Washington mayor on “The District,” an Alaskan bush pilot on “Men in Trees” and a macho gay man (whose lover is played by Stacy Keach) on “Two and a Half Men.”

He also toured for years in “Halley’s comet,” a one-man show he wrote about an octogenarian who reflects on his life. It became a staple of regional theaters and Black arts festivals.

His desire to write such a play grew out of a traumatic memory from his youth.

He told Ebony magazine that in third grade, he was bullied by a White music teacher for refusing to sing the Stephen Foster parlor song “Old Black Joe” at a school singalong. He cried in front of 800 laughing students but held his ground.

“As a result of that incident,” he said, “it became my ambition to create roles for myself and for other Black and minority actors that were more reflective of our contributions to the world. … It gave me the strength to turn down jobs that paid astronomical amounts of money. It also gave me the belief that God was preparing me for something much greater than the jobs I was turning down.”

Newark to Hollywood

John Allen Amos Jr. was born in Newark on Dec. 27, 1939, and grew up in nearby East Orange. His father was a truck driver and mechanic, and his mother was a domestic and later a nutritionist.

Mr. Amos was 2 when his parents divorced, and as a teenager, he helped support the family by working as a garbage collector and a street cleaner. On athletic scholarships, he attended Long Beach (Calif.) City College and Colorado State University.

After being cut from the British Columbia Lions, his last semipro football team, he headed for Los Angeles determined to break into TV comedy. In his day job in advertising, he was not the most committed employee and was put on warning after presenting his bosses with a fake ad campaign for an embalming machine; it featured a cadaver hooked up to gas pumps and had the tagline, “You bring ’em in, we fill ’em up.”

He moonlighted for a local TV comedy program before joining the writing staff of “The Leslie Uggams Show.” He also began making brief appearances as an actor, billed as Johnny Amos, and his credits included Melvin Van Peebles’s low-budget landmark of Black and independent cinema, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971). “Melvin and I are friends, and he needed a man on a motorcycle, and I had one,” he later told a reporter.

Mr. Amos also appeared in films, including Disney’s “The World’s Greatest Athlete” (1973), as a harried college track coach, and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), as a bookmaking heavy named Kansas City Mack, playing opposite Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby as a pair of good-natured schemers.

His marriages to Noel Mickelson, actress Lillian Lehman and Elisabete de Sousa ended in divorce. He had two children from his first marriage, director and actor K.C. Amos and Shannon Amos.

In 2023, Mr. Amos publicly accused Shannon of elder abuse after she filed a complaint accusing an unnamed party of the same crime and started a GoFundMe page seeking money to help with her legal complaint. The Los Angeles Police Department launched an investigation earlier this year, and the case was closed because of lack of evidence and what the department called a family dispute, People magazine reported.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

After settling in New Jersey in the 1980s, Mr. Amos started a foundation that took inner-city youths sailing to teach them how to put aside differences and work toward a common goal.

Reflecting on his own disposition, Mr. Amos said, in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, that he had mellowed considerably as he aged, and he told of a run-in with Willis during the filming of “Die Hard 2” to make his point.

Willis, an on-screen tough guy, had called Mr. Amos a clown for having taken extra time to rehearse a scene. Mr. Amos said he draped an arm around Willis and, evoking their shared upbringing in the rough and tumble of New Jersey, remarked that had they been classmates, he would have shaken Willis down for his lunch money every day.

“I’ll never work with Bruce Willis again,” he said, “but he’ll never insult John Amos again. … Everyone’s got respect coming until they forfeit it. And when they disrespect it, call them on it.”