‘Good Times’ Father and ‘Roots’ Star Dies at Age 84 | People

John Amos, the TV author turned Emmy-nominated actor who starred because the stoic father on Good Times earlier than he was fired from the landmark sitcom for objecting to stereotypes and admittedly letting his mood get the perfect of him, has died. He was 84.

Amos died Aug. 21 in Los Angeles of pure causes, his son, Okay.C. Amos, introduced.

“It is with heartfelt sadness that I share with you that my father has transitioned,” he stated in an announcement. “He was a man with the kindest heart and a heart of gold… and he was loved the world over. Many fans consider him their TV father. He lived a good life. His legacy will live on in his outstanding works in television and film as an actor.”

Amos, who performed soccer at Colorado State University and had coaching camp tryouts with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, noticed his showbiz profession take off after he landed a gig to play WJN-TV weatherman Gordy Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The New Jersey native obtained his Emmy nom for portraying Toby, the older model of Kunta Kinte, on the acclaimed 1977 ABC miniseries Roots, and he had a recurring function as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC’s West Wing.

His profession on the massive display started with Melvin Van Peebles‘ blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), and he performed the supervisor of a McDonald’s-like restaurant who hires an African prince (Eddie Murphy) and his right-hand man (Arsenio Hall) in Coming to America (1988).

Many years earlier, Amos had been within the McDonald’s coaching program earlier than showing as an worker for the fast-food chain in a well known 1971 commercial (“Grab a bucket and mop, scrub the bottom and top!”) that he stated helped put his youngsters by means of faculty.

After exhibiting up a dozen occasions because the good-natured Gordy on the primary 4 seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the barrel-chested Amos was invited to learn for the a part of James Evans Sr., the husband of Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans and father of their three youngsters, on a brand new CBS sequence, Good Times.

The 1974-79 present, created by Eric Monte and Mike Evans and developed by Norman Lear, was set in an inner-city Chicago house situated within the tasks (suppose Cabrini-Green). A by-product of Maude (itself a descendant of All within the Family), Good Times was the primary sitcom to middle on an African-American household.

“Everybody knew who Norman Lear was,” Amos said in a 2014 interview for the Televison Academy Foundation. “I’d seen the pilot episode of All within the Family and thought, ‘There’s no approach on the earth they’re going to place that on tv.’ … Sure sufficient, it grew to become successful.

“So I went in and read with Miss Rolle for Norman Lear, with just the three of us in his office. When we finished the reading, Norman looked at Esther, and Esther looked at me and looked at Norman and said, ‘He’ll do just fine.'”

Amos starred on the present for 3 seasons, however he quickly disapproved of the foolish, stereotypical storylines that surrounded their oldest son on the sequence, J.J. — performed by the comedian Jimmie Walker — and he went public along with his criticism.

“We had a number of differences,” he stated. “I felt an excessive amount of emphasis was being placed on J.J. in his hen hat, saying ‘Dy-no-mite!’ each third web page. I felt simply as a lot emphasis and mileage might have been gotten out of my different two kids, one in every of whom aspired to develop into a (*84*) Court justice, performed by Ralph Carter, and the opposite, BernNadette Stanis, who aspired to develop into a surgeon.

“But I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days, and [the show’s producers] got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes. So they said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we kill him off? We can get on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson — I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show or to Norman Lear’s plans.”

James Evans Sr. was the sufferer of a automotive accident in a two-part episode that aired in September 1976 to kick off season 4.

John Alan Amos Jr. was born on Dec. 27, 1939, in Newark, New Jersey. His father drove a tractor-trailer and labored as a mechanic, and his mom, Annabelle, was a housekeeper who ultimately went again to high school and grew to become a nutritionist.

His mother cleaned the house of a cartoonist who drew for the Archie comics, and that led to Amos and a buddy attending a taping of radio’s The Archie Show at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “It blew my imagination wide open,” he stated.

“I was disappointed in a way, because none of them looked like Archie or Jughead or Veronica … Some of the magic disappeared, but the science of the industry became apparent to me.”

At East Orange High School, Amos drew cartoons and wrote columns for the college newspaper, performed a convict in a manufacturing of The Man Who Came to Dinner and was a star operating again.

Amos received soccer scholarships to Long Beach City College in California and then Colorado State University, the place the Rams had the longest dropping streak within the nation at the time.

“God kept telling me, ‘I don’t want you playing football,'” he stated. “The direction I was getting from above was to be a performer, to be a writer, something that I had always done and came easy for me.”

Still, Amos didn't surrender his dream of taking part in professional soccer, signing his first free-agent contract with the Broncos. (One of his coaching camp teammates was Ernie Barnes, whose portray, Sugar Shack, appeared within the opening credit of Good Times.)

Amos performed or tried out to play with many groups, together with the Norfolk Neptunes of the Continental Football League and the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League.

After the Chiefs reduce him for a second time, Coach Hank Stram allowed him to learn a poem about shattered goals to the gamers — and he obtained a standing ovation. “It was the first confirmation I got from my peers that I could write material that could evoke emotions in people,” he stated. “It was very gratifying, much more so than running off-tackle or trying to pick up a blitz.”

(Amos would play a retired participant battling accidents from his NFL days on the HBO sequence Ballers.)

In Vancouver, Amos did stand-up and met a tv author who inspired him to return to Los Angeles, the place he landed a writing and performing job on a syndicated TV selection present hosted by radio personalities Al Lohman and Roger Barkley. (Also getting their begins on that program: McLean Stevenson, Craig T. Nelson and Barry Levinson.)

That in flip led to work writing and performing in sketches on the 1969 CBS selection program The Leslie Uggams Show. Two producers there, Lorenzo Music and Dave Davis, had been serving to to develop a sequence for Mary Tyler Moore and thought he’d be nice for that.

“They could very easily have said, ‘Well, [Gordy] can be a sports announcer.’ That would have been [as easy as] falling off a log for me,” he recalled. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist; that implied the man could think.”

On the 1973-74 season of Maude, Amos appeared on three episodes as Florida’s husband, establishing the launch of Good Times.

James Evans struggled to search out full-time work, however “he provided for his family with any job that he could find. We managed to survive, and America loved that show. It was close to how most Americans lived at that time.”

In his 2014 TV Academy Foundation interview, Amos obtained emotional when he famous that he had “young men, in their 30s and 40, of every ethnicity imaginable, come up to me and say, ‘You’re the dad I never had.'”

After he left Good Times, Lear’s firm employed him to play a congressman on the pilot for a brand new present referred to as Onward and Upward. But he would stop that venture as effectively.

Amos had traveled a number of occasions to Africa, together with residing for months at a time in Liberia “to absorb the culture of the continent that I had come from, indirectly,” when he was approached to look in Roots.

“It was just what I needed,” he stated. “It took the bad taste of Good Times out of my mouth — not that Good Times had been all bad, but the circumstances under which I left and the acrimony between Norman Lear and myself … I realize that a lot of it I brought on myself. I was not the easiest guy in the world to get along with, or to direct. I challenged any and everybody. [Roots] was a vindication, a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.”

He and Lear ultimately obtained over it, and Amos starred for the producer in a short-lived 1994 sitcom, 704 Hauser, a few liberal household residing in Archie Bunker’s former home in Queens.

Amos additionally had recurring roles on different TV exhibits like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, on which he performed Will Smith’s stepfather; Hunter; The District; Men in Trees; All About the Andersons, as Anthony Anderson’s dad; and the Netflix drama The Ranch.

His movie résumé additionally included The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973), Let’s Do It Again (1975), The Beastmaster (1982), Die Hard 2 (1990), Ricochet (1991), Mac (1992), Night Trap (1993), For Better or Worse (1995), The Players Club (1998), Coming to America 2 (2021) and Because of Charley (2021).

In 1972, he appeared on Broadway in Tough to Get Help, directed by Carl Reiner.

When he discovered it robust to get work within the Nineties, Amos wrote and starred within the one-man play Halley’s Comet, about an 87-year-old man who ruminates concerning the state of the world whereas he waits within the woods for the approaching of “the comet.” He toured everywhere in the U.S. and in a number of abroad cities with the play for greater than twenty years.

More lately, he and his son produced the documentary America’s Dad.

In addition to Okay.C. (nicknamed for Amos’ days with the Chiefs), survivors embrace his daughter, Shannon, each from his first marriage to Noel “Noni” Mickelson. THR’s Gary Baum wrote about his youngsters’ acrimonious relationship in November.

Amos additionally was briefly married to actress Lillian Lehman, who performed Andre Braugher’s mom on Men of a Certain Age.

Duane Byrge contributed to this report.