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Actor Yaphet Kotto has been recognized as a master of his craft. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker called his acting "quietly beautiful"; a Village Voice contributor referred to him as "that solid, great actor"; and Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Film and Television, wrote that his characterizations had "an unerring solid decency" and "a fair- minded intelligence that made him heroic." But Kotto--for most of his more than three-decade-long career--has been a great actor consigned to mediocre roles. He has been typecast as a villain or a cop, pigeonholed in buddy action pictures, and even forced to play demeaning roles, like a eunuch in the television miniseries "Harem."
"I`m tired of playing detectives," Kotto stated in an interview for the Baltimore Sun in 1993. "I`m always called powerful, bulky or imposing.... Or they say I fill up a room. I`m a 200-pound, 6-foot 3-inch black guy. And I think I have this image of a monster. It`s very difficult." He told the Sun, "I want to try to play a much more sensitive man. A family man."
Kotto played a few "sensitive" roles in stage presentations, appearing in The Great White Hope and Fences; in films and on television, however, he`s had a harder time breaking the tough-guy image. In 1993 he debuted as Lieutenant Giardello in NBC television`s Thursday-night cop drama, Homicide. Created by movie producer Barry Levinson, Homicide mixes documentary- style camera work with sharp character studies. The series propelled Kotto back onto the small screen after years of feature film work.
Kotto traces his family history back to the Douala region of Cameroon in western Africa, where his father Manga Bell, was a prince and grandson of King Alexander Bell, the nation`s monarch during the late nineteenth century. When the Germans began to move into Cameroon in the 1920s, Kotto`s family emigrated to New York City. Having settled in Harlem, Kotto`s father took the given name Abraham, because he had converted to Judaism in Cameroon; the surname Kotto (meaning "trees" in Cameroonian) was the name of a cousin.
Abraham Kotto took a job in the construction industry and married Gladys Maria, a Catholic army nurse of Panamanian descent. The couple had a son on November 15, 1944, and named him Yaphet, which means "beautiful" in Hebrew. Yaphet was three when his parents divorced. He lived with his maternal grandparents in the Bronx and attended Catholic school at the behest of his mother, who was often called away by the service. "We were the only black family in the neighborhood," he told the New York Times, "and I was about the only black kid at St. Augustine`s School. It was still all Irish in those days and I wasn`t as big as I am now, just a skinny kid. But I never had any trouble."
Growing up, Kotto watched the New York Yankees from a roof overlooking Yankee Stadium. He celebrated the Christian holidays with his mother and her family, but he also studied Torah with his father and was bar mitzvahed. In 1994 he told People: "To this day I open books from the back, having read the Torah so much."
Kotto became fascinated with the acting field as an adolescent; he claims to have empathized with on-screen characters who were spurned or rejected. When he saw the 1954 classic On the Waterfront, he easily related to Marlon Brando`s role as a misfit. "He seemed so defiant," Kotto explained to People. "He really couldn`t express his feelings to the girl. It reminded me of m
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"I do have a favorite kind of director, which is the kind who allows me to create. Some haven`t allowed me to create and I think by doing that they don`t need an actor. They need a puppet."
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