For the opening scene of Shaft – the 1971 film that helped launch the “blaxploitation” genre and spawned an Oscar-winning song in Isaac Hayes’ call-and-response classic “Theme from Shaft” – director Gordon Parks chose the actor Richard Roundtree exactly what would happen.
Roundtree – in the role of New York detective John Shaft, who “can’t get away when danger is everywhere,” as the song says – was supposed to step out of the subway near Times Square, pursued by various people opposite him and Cameras positioned at high angles. “I want you to walk across 42nd Street,” Parks said. “And I want it to be yours.”
He made it his own. In his beige turtleneck and brown leather trench coat, Roundtree struts and weaves through the hustle and bustle, looking amused at a demonstration taking place around him (which had nothing to do with the film itself, but was a real protest by the Gay Activists Alliance). and He improvises the moment when he gives the middle finger to an impatient taxi driver. “I owned it,” he reflected. “Much better than I could have ever imagined.”
For Roundtree, who has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 81, it was the first major film appearance that shaped him for the rest of his life. The casting came after a meeting with Parks, a former photojournalist, who showed him a magazine ad and said, “We’re sort of looking for a guy who looks like that.” Coincidentally, it was an ad featuring Roundtree himself.
When selecting 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 keen awareness of black culture. He wanted the audience to “see the black man win.”
This determination paid off and saved the struggling studio from bankruptcy. “Ghetto kids came 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 films about the history of our people, yes, but we also need heroic fantasies about our people. We all need a little James Bond every now and then.”
Roundtree alongside Moses Gunn in Shaft. Photo: Moviestore/ShutterstockJohn Shaft was suave and uncompromising, free to dispense justice his own way, and made of fancier stuff than the classier roles that African-American stars like Sidney Poitier were known for. In 2000, critic Elvis Mitchell noted that Roundtree’s “enjoyment on the screen, itself a kind of dynamism, was linked to the audience’s hunger.” And he held the screen like an aristocrat.” Mitchell compared him to Sean Connery and identified him as “the same outsized source of charm and masculinity, but with a leavening… sense of self-deprecation.”
He did many of his own stunts. “We were able to get close with our helicopter shots because you could see that it was actually Roundtree and not a stunt driver,” Parks said. “We spent 12 days on this chase and destroyed four cars, two boats and a dummy helicopter.”
The actor returned for two sequels, Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), which Parks also directed, and Shaft in Africa (1973), which unfortunately was not directed. After a brief Shaft TV series that same year, which Roundtree described as “an ugly point in my long, illustrious career,” he was done with John Shaft. Currently.
Richard was born in New Rochelle, New York, to Kathryn (née Watkins), a cook and housekeeper, and John Roundtree, a garbage collector and later church minister. He attended New Rochelle High School and won a football scholarship to Southern Illinois University. After working at Barneys department store, he modeled 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 their 1967 production of The Great White Hope.
Taking advantage of the Shaft heat, he appeared alongside Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in the disaster film Earthquake (1974), played the title character in Man Friday (1975) opposite Peter O’Toole as Robinson Crusoe, and appeared as a swashbuckling coachman on the slavery-era television drama Roots (1977).
Between television series, most recently “Family Reunion” on Netflix, he appeared in the action comedy “City Heat” (1984), set during the Depression and starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, as well as in the gruesome serial killer ” Seven” (1995) alongside Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, the Disney comedy “George of the Jungle” (1997) and Rian Johnson’s funny neo-noir thriller “Brick” (2005).
After turning down various Shaft-related offers, he finally relented and appeared in John Singleton’s remake 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 actually his son and spawned a new generation in the form of a sensitive, gun-hating grandson.
“Everyone has wanted to be you for a really long time,” Jackson told Roundtree in a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “You defined what was cool – you had the look, the walk, the attitude.”
Roundtree was pigeonholed by the role in the 1970s and eventually made peace with it. “Sometimes it’s a lot easier to ride the horse in the direction it’s going,” he said.
He was married and divorced twice, first to Mary Jane Grant and then to Karen Ciernia. He is survived by two daughters, Kelli and Nicole, from his first marriage, two daughters, Tayler and Morgan, and a son, John, from his second marriage.
Richard Arnold Roundtree, actor, born July 9, 1942; died on October 24, 2023