Richard Roundtree, an icon of blaxploitation film who starred as detective John Shaft in Gordon Parks’ 1971 action thriller, died on Tuesday afternoon after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 81 years old.
His death was confirmed by Patrick McMinn, his manager since 1987.
“Richard’s work and career served as a turning point for African-American leading men in film,” McMinn said in his statement. “The impact he has had on the industry cannot be overstated.”
Roundtree was a leading man from the very beginning of his screen career. After beginning his career in modelling, he made his feature film debut in Shaft at the age of 28. The MGM release grossed $12 million from a production budget of $500,000, helping to save the studio from bankruptcy. A breakthrough hit, Shaft set the tone for a fruitful decade of blaxploitation filmmaking and demonstrated Hollywood’s historic failure to consider black talent and the audiences it could reach.
When asked about the “exploitation” label attached to Shaft by the New York Times in a 2019 interview, Roundtree expressed some ambivalence about the term.
“I’ve had the privilege of working with probably the classiest gentleman I’ve ever known in the business, Gordon Parks. So that word, exploitation, I take offense to with any attachment to Gordon Parks… I’ve always seen that as a negative. Exploitation. Who’s being exploited?” Roundtree said. “But it gave a lot of people work. It got a lot of people into the business, including a lot of our current producers and directors. So, in the grand scheme of things, I see it as a positive.”
Two sequels to the “bad mother (shut your mouth)” quickly followed within two years: “Shaft’s Big Score” and “Shaft in Africa”. In 1973, CBS attempted a Shaft television series starring Roundtree – a run that lasted only a handful of episodes.
“You can’t erase events, but this is one I wish I could,” Roundtree told The Times in 2019. “I had just come back from ‘Shaft in Africa’ when they were trying to convert the character to television. It wasn’t going to happen. It was an ugly point in my long and illustrious career.”
Long and illustrious it was. Already a marquee name, Roundtree quickly outgrew his starring role with appearances in the ensemble disaster film “Earthquake”, a starring role opposite Peter O’Toole in “Man Friday” and another as a hapless detective in Larry Cohen’s monster comedy “Q – The Winged Serpent”. He also made frequent guest appearances on television, with credits including “Roots”, “Magnum P.I.” and “The Love Boat”.
Roundtree returned to the world of Shaft in director John Singleton’s 2000 revival of the franchise, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Although Jackson also played a detective named John Shaft, his character was written as the nephew of Roundtree’s original private eye. Both actors reprised their roles in 2019 for Tim Story’s comedic take on the series.
Born on 9 July 1942 in Rochester, N.Y., Roundtree briefly attended Southern Illinois University before dropping out to pursue a modelling career. In the late 60s, he joined the Negro Ensemble Company and began acting in New York stage productions.
Roundtree worked regularly for more than 50 years, with his iconic turn in “Shaft”, a rich history in genre filmmaking and a compelling screen presence that added colour to the worlds of films like “Se7en”, “Brick” and “Speed Racer”. He had a supporting role in “Moving On,” a comedy starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda that debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year before being released in theaters this summer.
Roundtree was married twice, first to Mary Jane Grant from 1963 to 1973 and then to Karen M. Cierna from 1980 to 1998. He is survived by four daughters, Nicole, Tayler, Morgan and Kelli Roundtree, and a son, James.
