Life & Style
Yaphet Kotto lead actor in President Idi Amin movie dies
Actor Yaphet Kotto
Yaphet Kotto, the American actor who played President Idi Amin in the Movie Raid on Entebbe died recently at the age of 81.
The 1977 movie Raid on Entebbe earned him an Emmy nomination after he effectively played a good character of Idi Amin.
The actor also played a crew member in 1979 sci-fi movie Alien, and starred in US TV police drama Homicide: Life on the Street.
Kotto’s other credits included the 1980s action films The Running Man and Midnight Run.
His acting career also included roles in the A-Team and Law and Order, and he played as Lieutenant Al Giardello in seven series of the gritty Homicide: Life on the Street, for which he also worked as a scriptwriter.
News of his death were confirmed by his wife Sinahon Thessa where she said the actor died in Philippines on Monday.
“You played a villain on some of your movies but for me you’re a real hero and to a lot of people also,” she wrote.
“A good man, a good father, a good husband and a decent human being, very rare to find. One of the best actors in Hollywood, a Legend. Rest in Peace Honey, I’m gonna miss you everyday, my best friend, my rock.” she added.
Kotto was born in New York to a Cameroonian immigrant father and a US Army nurse, and studied acting from the age of 16.
At 19, he made his professional theatre debut in Othello, and later performed on Broadway in The Great White Hope.
His first few film projects included Nothing But a Man in 1964 and The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968.
Kotto then had roles in 1974’s Truck Turner and 1978’s Blue Collar. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, he took the role of the space ship’s engineer Dennis Parker.
Kotto went on to play a supporting role in Brubaker in 1980, and then appear as a resistance fighter alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987’s The Running Man, and as an FBI agent in Robert De Niro’s Midnight Run the following year.
His other film credits also included Bill Cosby’s Man and Boy (1971), Across 110th Street (1972), Report to the Commissioner (1975), The Star Chamber (1983), Warning Sign (1985), Eye of the Tiger (1986) and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).
Most recently, he reprised his role as Lieutenant Giardello in Homicide: The Movie in 2000, and voiced his Alien character Parker in the Alien: Isolation video game.
Kotto is survived by six children and had been married three times.
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