Cult Actors #4: Yaphet Kotto - Coolness Personified
When Yaphet Kotto walks onscreen you take notice. Kotto has a presence that is regal, graceful and ferociously dignified. He is after all, the descendant of kings.
Yaphet Kotto walks onscreen you take notice. His broad 66 figure looms. He delivers lines with vocal cords that sound like theyve been massaged with sandpaper. In films like Alien (1979) he dominates the frame immovable, mountainous, impossible to scale. He has an air of regality about him, but then this to be expected. Kotto 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 personality onscreen. He can be both a regular Joe (the disgruntled worker in Blue Collar) or a powerful leader (he has played Othello more than once). But growing up in New York City was tough. Kotto, a black Jew, found discrimination around every corner and learnt early on the need for character. He learnt to stand tall. He began performing in his teens and appeared on a stage as Shakespeares Moorish Prince at the tender age of 19. He loved the intimacy of theatre but his command attracted attention elsewhere. In 1964 he made his screen debut in Nothing But A Man (1964) and later caught the eye in the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway vehicle The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) 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.Then came Bone. Largely forgotten in Kottos back catalogue, Bone holds up as perhaps one of his most daring pieces of work. The film marked the directorial debut of indie auteur Larry Cohen (later the director of Its Alive in 1973) and told the story of an affluent white couple in Beverly Hills who are terrorised by Kottos thief/rapist Bone. In this film reality is dreamlike and Bone is a manifestation a fantasy the white excuse.
Just a big black buck doing whats expected of him, as he puts it.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 110th Street. Pope is the one good cop in a department of corruption and institutionalized racism. He refuses bribes, Stick it up your ass, brother, and remains aloof from the depravity around him. In a sharp black suit and Malcolm X style glasses, Kotto brings nobility that couldnt 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 Bonds 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 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.