When Yaphet Kotto walks onscreen you take notice. His broad 6’6” figure towers over his fellow actors and he delivers lines with vocal cords that sound like they’ve been massaged with sandpaper. In films like Alien (1979), Blue Collar (1978) and Across 110^th Street (1972) he dominates the frame and gives the impression of an immovable man mountain impossible to scale. But there is more to him that just his imposing physicality. Kotto has a presence that is regal, graceful and ferociously dignified. He is after all, the descendant of kings.

His father, Njoki Manga Bell, was a Cameroonian Crown Prince who immigrated to New York in the 1920s. It was in this city that Kotto was born and that mix of street kid and son of a prince would inform his movie personality in the years to come. He is happy as both a regular Joe (like his role as the disgruntled worker in Blue Collar) or as a powerful blue-blooded leader (he has played Othello more than once). Growing up in New York City was tough. If being black wasn’t enough of a reason for people to discriminate against him, Kotto was, and is, a practising Jew. It was a faith carried over by his parents from Cameroon and early on he learnt the need for character and inner strength. He learnt to stand tall. He began performing at 19 and appeared in a stage version of Othello. His inner power and royal demeanour were perfectly suited to the role of the jealous moor and the roles began to flood in.

After an initial reluctance to leave the theatre, in the 60s he began to accept roles onscreen and made an impression in his debut Nothing but a Man (1964). In 1968 he featured in the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway vehicle The Thomas Crown Affair playing a professional heister. In a porkpie hat, dark glasses and a lean grey suit he predates the Ska movement by a good ten years and almost manages to out cool McQueen:

“How you doin, Chief?” asks one of his fellow hold-up men. “OK, Baby,” he replies. “OK.” He’s a man who’s going to get the job done – and he’s going to do it with style.

Then came Bone. Largely forgotten in Kotto’s back catalogue, Bone holds up as perhaps one of his most unique and daring pieces of work. The film marked the directorial debut of legendary indie auteur Larry Cohen (later the director of It’s Alive in 1973, God Told Me To in ‘76 and Q the Winged Serpent in ‘82) and told the story of an affluent white couple in Beverly Hills who are terrorised by Kotto’s thief/rapist Bone. If anything the film is a fantasy; but who’s we are never sure. It could be the dissatisfied wife who dreams of a chance to off her husband. It could be the husband who would rather keep his money than his wife. It could even be the teenage son they left to rot in a Spanish jail, laying in a cell and happily imagining his parents being tortured.

In any case Bone is a manifestation – a fantasy – the white excuse. He’s the justification they need for staying out of black neighbourhoods or the person they can blame for any crime committed anywhere. ‘Bone, you’re just as I imagined you’d be,’ whispers housewife Bernadette. Kotto looms over them. He walks with a swagger and eyes Bernadette with deep, penetrating brown eyes. Sweat seeps through his clothes and drips from his dark skin along with his oozing sexuality. He’s the rapist black demon from a white nightmare,

“Just a big black buck doing what’s expected of him,’ as he puts it.

Bone revels in his status as a stereotype, using what he calls, “the nigger mystique,” to terrify white racists. But his power is waning and he begins to realise that the caricature of blackness he created has no place in an enlightened society. In the end he disappears as mysteriously as he arrived. But he still has strength somewhere. After Bernadette kills her husband she informs the police,

“It was a black. It was a huge black man.”

Racism doesn’t get out of Middle America so easily. Following Bone (Known in the UK as Dial Rat for Terror) Kotto had a run of successes. In ‘72 he was the college educated Lieutenant William Pope in the gritty, street level Across 110^th Street. Pope is the one good cop in a department of corrupt, racist and violent police officers. He’s given the case of investigating the murder of several mobsters and is teamed up with Anthony Quinn’s aging, old school detective.

Quinn’s Mattelli takes bribes from Harlem gangster Doc Johnson, while Pope refuses. “Stick it up your ass, brother,” he tells the Mob boss. In a world of extreme violence and brutality, Pope is the last vestige of human decency. He’s unsoiled by the depravity around him and is determined to get the killers by the book. In a sharp black suit and black framed Malcolm X style glasses, Kotto brings a nobility that couldn’t be further from his portrayal of Bone the same year.

He appears to slip into character easily, but by his own confession this is not the case. In 1973 he became the King of the Caribbean underworld in the James Bond adventure Live and Let Die and got lost in his role. Kotto played the dual parts of Mr Big/ Dr Kananga as a man in awe of Bond. He copies Bond’s suits, his love of women, gadgets and cars and Kotto began to do the same in real life. Outside of the film he insisted on being driven in limousines, only stayed in the finest hotels, he drank champagne by the bucket full and travelled the world like his own version of an international playboy spy. “It took me three years to stop this foolishness,’ he later admitted.

For his role as Parker in Alien he also applied a method approach. The tough talking, hard-as-nails mechanic was a powerhouse, a man of action, and Kotto refused to believe that the slick black alien creature could kill him. He was fired up and would corner director Ridley Scott everyday and bark: “I’m gonna kill it, man. There’s no way it can kill me.” Indeed, there is a scene in the film were Lambert, his shipmate aboard the Nostromo, is trapped by the alien and Parker stands his ground and will not leave her to die. He can’t get a clear shot with his flamethrower and screams for her to run. But she is paralysed with a fear and so he tosses his weapon aside and lunges with his bear hands. The creature’s skin is like armour, it towers above even Kotto and it bleeds acid. But Kotto is so intense, so powerful and so ferocious that for a second, a fraction of time, we believe that this man could tear the creature apart. This performance was all Kotto. Ridley Scott was determined to focus on the film’s breathtaking visuals and as a result didn’t want to waste time directing actors.

The casting director was instructed to fill out the roles with performers who could be trusted to play, “truckers in space,” with no help from Scott. As a result Alien boasts one of the finest casts ever assembled for a science fiction movie. Alongside the outstanding Sigourney Weaver there is Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas, The Birds (1963) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) star Veronica Cartwright, British giants Ian Holm and John Hurt, and the legendary Harry Dean Stanton (himself destined to feature in his own Cult Movie Actors article) as Kotto’s fellow mechanic Brett. Kotto is a key figure in this illustrious crew and displayed an enjoyable onscreen chemistry with Stanton.

Together they bitch about shares, smoke cigarettes and belittle the officers on board. They are the real blue collar workers in space, who behind their griping are skilled professionals.

“When we fix something it stays fixed, don’t we, Brett baby?” cries Parker. “Right,” is his partner’s typical response.

Kotto is a keen improviser and liked to keep the other cast members on their toes. When Captain Dallas is killed, Weaver’s Ripley assumes command and begins by giving orders to the surviving crew. Parker’s interruptions and taunts were improvised onset to break Weaver’s flow and to get a reaction from her. Her ultimate explosion,

“Will you listen to me, Parker! Shut up!” was genuine. “Yaphet likes to stir things up,” observed Tom Skerritt.

Following Alien Kotto was invited by George Lucas to stay in space and take the part of Lando Calrissian in his Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Kotto refused, fearing that the character would be killed and he would become typecast. While he was wrong about Lando’s chances of survival, actor Billy Dee Williams has since struggled to shake the part off. Kotto perhaps made the right move. Since then he has continued to mix things up, dividing his time between film and television.

On the small screen he has been in The A-Team, took part in the groundbreaking TV mini-series Roots about black slavery and snared a recurring role in the award winning Homicide: Life of the Street as Lt. Al Giardello. In film he ran a post apocalyptic gauntlet alongside Schwarzenegger in The Running Man (1987) (looking a little middle-aged and paunchy in his red and grey addias jump suit) and stole cigarettes as a befuddled FBI chief in the exceptional DeNiro movie Midnight Run (1988). Like many character actors the older he gets, the less parts there are available to him. In later years his sense of regal nobility means he usually plays authority figures: cops, detectives and military men. In 1994 he was wasted in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers/The Thing/Alien homage The Puppet Masters. As General Ressler he hardly utters a word and is perhaps only there because of his Alien connection. Now well into his 70s Kotto continues to act. Though his psychical strength may have left him, Kotto still demands attention. He is proud, intense and a leader of men. He may have missed his chance in real life, but onscreen at least, Yaphet Kotto is a king.

Tom Fallows is a well respected writer and soon to be published author when the pocket essential guide to George A. Romero’s work hits stands in October.

This article is the fourth in the marvellous Cult Actors Series…

Cult Actors #3 – Rutger Hauer

Cult Actors #2– Adrienne Barbeau

Cult Actors #1: Brad Dourif