John Amos was a pioneering and reassuring presence on screen and elsewhere

There is something unusual about the fact that more than a month passed before the death of 84-year-old actor John Amos was announced Tuesday. But it takes a while for a powerful personality to completely stop.

Golden Gloves champion, college football player, and minor league soccer player before transitioning to entertainment (first as a Greenwich Village stand-up comedian, then writing for Leslie Uggams' 1969 variety show, and finally graduating from the screen), Amos was made to play authority figures (or anti-authority figures). Roles throughout his long and busy career include reverend, inspector, captain, sergeant, medic, coach, sheriff, minister, mayor, deacon and, notably, Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 22 episodes of “The West Wing,” prestige television before the letter. (When Amos met then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Powell's first words to him were: “Percy Fitzwallace? What kind of name is that for a brother?”)

Even “Gordy the Weatherman,” as many of us first met Amos, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” fit the bill. “Gordy was eloquent,” Amos recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist. [rather than a sportscaster] because it implies that man could think, above the X's and O's.” (In a running joke, he would be mistaken for a sportscaster.)

And of course, in the role for which he is possibly best known, he played a father, not the comical fool whose children are all smarter than him, but a caring figure, responsible and strict when it mattered. Amos was just 34 years old when he was cast as James Evans, Sr., in the 1974 “Maude” spinoff, “Good Times.” Reflecting his innate maturity, he was 19 years younger than Esther Rolle, who played his wife. (He had played a version of the role in some episodes of “Maude.”)

In keeping with the Norman Lear house style, loud, agitated moments and fits of temper alternated with quiet, reflective and more emotional moments, like “The Honeymooners,” but with commentary on class and race. It demonstrated the actor's range, but Amos began to sour on the show when he felt the focus was shifting to Jimmie Walker's comic antics as deadbeat son JJ: “Dyn-o-mite!” you may remember him, and he said it: “I wasn't the most diplomatic guy in those days,” he said in the same Academy interview. Eventually, the writers “got tired of having their lives threatened over pranks” and, after the third season, Lear let him go. James died off-screen.

But “Roots” was just around the corner; As an earlier version of LeVar Burton's Kunta Kinte, it made the history books and opened the door to dramatic roles.

Due to the time in which he was born, Amos was a kind of pioneer. He was one of the few black students to integrate his New Jersey elementary and middle school, where he was asked if he had a tail. He married his first wife, Noel J. Mickelson, the mother of his two children, who was white, in 1965, two years before the Loving v. Virginia, where the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage. And he started out as an actor at a time when it was harder to get big roles for black actors and the idea of ​​colorblind casting was a thing of the distant future.

John Amos in 1989, when he starred in “Twelfth Night” at the Central Park Theater in New York.

(René Pérez / Associated Press)

The stage, for its part, allowed him to perform works by Athol Fugard (“'Master Harold'… and the Boys” in Detroit), Eugene O'Neill (a tour of “The Emperor Jones” in the part created by Paul Robeson), August Wilson (“Fences” in Albany) and Shakespeare (Sir Toby Belch in a 1989 production of “Twelfth Night” for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park, opposite Andre Braugher, LisaGay Hamilton, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gregory Hines ). In 1990, he created his own one-man show, “Halley's Comet,” in which he played a man looking back through the century and with which he toured in 2017.

Between peaks, his career charts the familiar pattern of an actor who goes where the work goes, including a reunion with Norman Lear in the short-lived “704 Hauser,” about a black family who moves into Archie Bunker's old house; recurring roles on the UPN Debbie Allen-LL Cool J comedy “In the House” and the CBS crime drama “The District”; and the NBC crime drama “Hunter.” There were many, many guest shots on “The Love Boat” and “The A-Team,” to “30 Rock” and “The Righteous Gemstones.” On the big screen, among many forgotten films, there were well-remembered roles in Eddie Murphy's “Coming to America” ​​and an appearance as himself in Josh and Benny Safdie's “Uncut Gems.”

Television is where he cared most. Perhaps my favorite Amos role was as pilot Buzz Washington in Anne Heche's 2006 Alaska-set comedy “Men in Trees.” Married for 10 years to mail-order bride Mai (Lauren Tom), who could be difficult, he emphasized the gentleness underlying his best roles; could be a calming presence on screen. Powerful people don't need to shout to be heard and are all the more powerful for it.