It took Richard Roundtree a long time to come to terms with his pioneering role in Shaft, the movie that launched the blaxploitation genre and opened the door to a generation of black filmmakers and performers.
After playing the private detective John Shaft in the landmark 1971 film, he reprised the role of “the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about” in Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973).
Yet by the time the franchise transferred to the small screen in a toned-down version that deservedly flopped, he had concluded that the role had become a millstone round his neck and he was never going to be known for anything else.
It took a conversation with his father to reconcile him. “Son, let me tell you something,” his father, who was deeply religious and had refused to watch the Shaft movies, told him. “A lot of people leave this Earth not being known for anything. So shut up.”
He took the paternal advice. The complaining ceased and he came to take pride in having changed the relationship between black America and Hollywood. “For a long time I saw it as a double-edged sword as I got typecast,” he noted in a 2019 interview.
Advertisement
“I’ve since gone out of my way to establish a different side of my acting but I’ve had so many people come up and say what that film meant to them … It’s heavy and I’m appreciative of people sharing that with me.”
When the franchise was revived in 2000, Roundtree became “Uncle John Shaft”, 30 years older and wiser and dispensing advice to Samuel L Jackson in the lead role. He and Jackson returned in the same roles for a fifth Shaft movie in 2019.
The original film was based on a novel by Ernest Tidyman in which Shaft was black. However, when Tidyman was contracted by MGM to write the screenplay he rewrote the part for a white actor. His decision reflected Hollywood expectations at the time but Gordon Parks, a noted black photographer who was stepping up to direct his first feature film, insisted on a black actor and cast Roundtree as the eponymous hero.
In doing so he created Hollywood’s first black action hero as Roundtree brilliantly essayed a character who “moves through Whitey’s world with perfect ease and aplomb but never loses his independence or his awareness of where his life is really at”, as The New York Times reviewer noted.
The film found success with black and white audiences. Ed Guerrero in his 1993 study Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film suggested that the desire to create a “fun film which people could attend on Saturday night and see a black guy winning” had been more important than wanting to make a statement about black power.
Advertisement
Parks subsequently said he had always hoped that by presenting “a hero they hadn’t had before” the film would inspire young African-Americans. “We need movies about the history of our people, yes, but we need heroic fantasies about our people too,” he added. “We all need a little James Bond now and then.”
Roundtree’s two marriages to Mary Jane Grant, from 1963 to 1973, and to Karen Michelle Ciernia, between 1980 and 1998, ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughters: Kelli, Nicole, Tayler and Morgan Roundtree and a son, John James.
Richard Roundtree was born in 1942 in New Rochelle, New York, the son of Kathryn (née Watkins), a maid and nurse, and John Roundtree, a garbage collector who later became a Pentecostal minister. At New Rochelle High School he played for its undefeated American football team and on graduating in 1961 won an athletics scholarship to Southern Illinois University.
He dropped out after two years to become a model, striking poses at the Ebony Fashion Fair and appearing in ads for cigarettes and hair cream. After Bill Cosby had advised him to move to New York and hone his acting skills he did so in 1967, joining the city’s Negro Ensemble Company while working as a cab driver by day.
His first lead role came playing the boxer Jack Johnson in the company’s production of Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer prizewinning play The Great White Hope. He was on tour with the play in Philadelphia when he heard about the auditions for Shaft and was picked by Parks at the “cattle call”, even though he had no real movie experience.
Advertisement
Roundtree’s character was promoted as “a lone, black Superspade — a man of flair and flamboyance who has fun at the expense of the establishment”. Supported by Isaac Hayes’s memorable hit theme song and a striking poster that declared “Shaft’s his name and Shaft’s his game”, the film was a box-office hit, grossing $13 million, an extraordinary return for a picture that cost only $500,000 to make.
Roundtree was paid just $12,500 for his star appearance. By the time of the follow-up Shaft’s Big Score! his fee had quadrupled as the franchise became a phenomenon, spawning a host of Blaxploitation imitators and influenced white film makers as well as black. Even the 1973 Bond movie Live and Let Die included elements inspired by Shaft.
Seeking to move away from the blaxploitation genre he appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in Inchon (1981) and alongside Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in City Heat (1984).
However, the film of which he was most proud was Once Upon a Time … When We Were Coloured (1996), about a black family growing up in a segregated Deep South populated by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, based on Clifton Taulbert’s Pulitzer prize-nominated memoir. It was the first of his films that his father agreed to see.
On television he was outstanding in the 1977 series Roots based on Alex Haley’s novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, playing a slave who is whipped by his master. Years later the actor George Hamilton who delivered the whipping, apologised to Roundtree for ever having agreed to the scene.
Advertisement
Roundtree was also a familiar face in TV shows from Magnum P.I. to Desperate Housewives and was most recently seen as a regular in the Netflix sitcom Family Reunion.
Even as he came to terms with for ever being known as John Shaft, he never accepted the “blaxploitation” tag. “I’ve always viewed that word as a negative,” he said. “Who’s being exploited? But it gave a lot of people work and it gave a lot of people an entrée into the business. So, in the big picture, I have to view it as a positive.”
Richard Roundtree, actor, was born on July 9, 1942. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 24, 2023, aged 81
