“Good Times” father and “Roots” actor was 84

John Amos, the television writer turned Emmy-nominated actor, starred in the series The Stoic Father. Good times He died before being fired from the groundbreaking sitcom for protesting stereotypes and admittedly letting his temper get the better of him. He was 84.

Amos died of natural causes in Los Angeles on August 21, his son KC Amos announced.

“It is with deep sadness that I inform you that my father has made the transition,” he said in a statement. “He was a man with the kindest heart and a heart of gold… and he was loved around the world. Many fans consider him to be their TV father. He lived a good life. His legacy will live on in his outstanding work as an actor on television and film.”

Amos, who played football at Colorado State University and attended training camps with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, experienced the breakthrough of his showbiz career after landing a gig as WJM-TV weatherman Gordy Howard The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The New Jersey native received his Emmy nomination for portraying Toby, the older version of Kunta Kinte, in the acclaimed 1977 ABC miniseries rootsand he had a recurring role as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC West Wing.

His career on the big screen began with Melvin Van Peebles’ blaxploitation classic The Baadasssss song by Sweet Sweetback (1971) and he played the manager of a McDonald’s-like restaurant who hires an African prince (Eddie Murphy) and his right-hand man (Arsenio Hall). Coming to America (1988).

Many years earlier, Amos had attended McDonald’s training program before appearing as an employee of the fast food chain in a well-known 1970s commercial (“Take a bucket and a mop, scrub the bottom and the top!”), the he said helped his children graduate from college.

After appearing as the good-natured Gordy a dozen times in the first four seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore ShowThe barrel-chested Amos has been invited to read for the role of James Evans Sr., husband of Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans and father of her three children, in a new CBS series. Good times.

Created by Eric Monte and Mike Evans and developed by Norman Lear, the 1974-1979 show was set in a downtown Chicago apartment located in the projects (think Cabrini-Green). A spin-off from Maud (himself a descendant of Everything in the family), Good times was the first sitcom to feature an African-American family.

“Everyone knew who Norman Lear was,” Amos said in a 2014 interview for the Television Academy Foundation. “I had seen the pilot episode of Everything in the family and thought, “There’s no way they’re going to show this on TV.”…In fact, it became a hit.

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

Amos starred on the show for three seasons, but soon disapproved of the silly, stereotypical storylines that surrounded her eldest son on the show, JJ – played by comedian Jimmie Walker – and went public with his criticism.

“We had a number of differences,” he said. “I felt there was too much emphasis on JJ with his chicken hat and ‘Dy-no-mite!’ said. every third page. I felt that just as much emphasis and success could have been given to my other two children, one of whom, played by Ralph Carter, wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice and the other, BernNadette Stanis, wanted to be a surgeon.

“But I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy back then, and [the show’s producers] were fed up with their lives being threatened because of jokes. So they said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we kill him?’ We can move on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson: I wasn’t as important to the show or Norman Lear’s plans as I thought.”

James Evans Sr. was the victim of a car accident in a two-part episode that aired in September 1976 to open the fourth season.

John Alan Amos Jr. was born on December 27, 1939 in Newark, New Jersey. His father drove a semi-truck and worked as a mechanic, and his mother, Annabelle, was a housekeeper, eventually going back to school and becoming 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 radio broadcast taping The Archie Show at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “It opened my imagination wide,” he said.

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

At East Orange High School, Amos drew cartoons, wrote columns for the school newspaper and played a convict in a production of ” The man who came to dinner and was a star running back.

Amos won football scholarships to Long Beach City College in California and then to Colorado State University, where the Rams had the longest losing streak in the country at the time.

“God kept telling me, ‘I don’t want you to play football,'” he said. “The instruction that was given to me from above was to become a performer, to become a writer, something that I had always done and that came easily to me.”

Nevertheless, Amos didn’t give up on his dream of playing professional football and signed his first free agent contract with the Broncos. (One of his teammates in training camp was Ernie Barnes, whose painting Sugar shackappeared in the opening credits of Good times.)

Amos played or tried out for many teams, including the Norfolk Neptunes of the Continental Football League and the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League.

After the Chiefs cut him a second time, coach Hank Stram allowed him to read the players a poem about broken dreams — and he received 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 said. “It was very enjoyable, much more so than running without a tackle or trying to learn a blitz attack.”

(Amos would play a retired player in the HBO series dealing with injuries from his NFL days Baller.)

In Vancouver, Amos did a stand-up gig and met a television writer who encouraged him to come to Los Angeles, where he got a job as a writer and performer for a syndicated TV variety show hosted by radio personality Al Lohman and hosted by Roger Barkley. (McLean Stevenson, Craig T. Nelson and Barry Levinson also begin this program.)

That in turn led to him writing and performing sketches for the 1969 CBS variety program The Leslie Uggams Show. Two producers there, Lorenzo Music and Dave Davis, were helping develop a series for Mary Tyler Moore and thought he would be a great fit for it.

“They could very easily have said, ‘Well, [Gordy] can be a sports announcer.’ That would have been [as easy as] “I fell off the tree trunk,” he remembers. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist; that meant the man could think.”

In the 1973/74 season MaudAmos appeared in three episodes as Florida’s husband, setting up the launch of Good times.

James Evans struggled to find full-time work, but “he provided for his family with whatever job he could find.” We managed to survive and America loved this show. It was pretty much the way most Americans lived at the time.”

In his interview with the TV Academy Foundation, Amos became emotional when he noted that “young men in their 30s and 40s of every ethnicity imaginable came up to me and said, ‘You’re the father I never had’.”

After he left Good timesLear’s company hired him to play a congressman in the pilot for a new show entitled Onwards and upwards. But he would also give up this project.

Amos had traveled to Africa several times, including living in Liberia for months “to absorb the culture of the continent from which I indirectly came,” when he was approached to perform roots.

“It was exactly what I needed,” he said. “It tasted bad Good times from my mouth – not that Good times It had all been bad, but the circumstances in which I left and the argument between Norman Lear and me… I realize that a lot of it was of my own making. I wasn’t exactly easy to get along with or direct. I challenged anyone and everyone. [Roots] was a confirmation, an enormous feeling of satisfaction.”

He and Lear eventually got over it and Amos starred for the producer in a short-lived 1994 sitcom. 704 housesabout a liberal family living in Archie Bunker’s former home in Queens.

Amos has also had recurring roles on other television shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Airin which he played Will Smith’s stepfather; hunter; The district; Men in trees; All about the Andersonsas Anthony Anderson’s father; and the Netflix drama The ranch.

His film CV also included The greatest athlete in the world (1973), Let’s do it again (1975), The Beastmaster (1982), Die Hard 2 (1990), Bounce (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 It’s difficult to get helpDirector: Carl Reiner.

When he found it difficult to find a job in the 1990s, Amos wrote the script for the one-man play and starred in it Halley’s cometabout an 87-year-old man contemplating the state of the world while waiting in the forest for the “comet” to arrive. He toured the play throughout the United States and in several cities overseas for more than two decades.

Most recently, he and his son produced the documentary America’s father.

In addition to KC (the nickname comes from Amos’ days with the Chiefs), survivors include his daughter Shannon, both from his first marriage to Noel “Noni” Mickelson. THR’Gary Baum wrote in November about his children’s bitter relationship.

Amos was also briefly married to actress Lillian Lehman, who played Andre Braugher’s mother on the series Men of a certain age.

Duane Byrge contributed to this report.