Richard Roundtree, who played the title role in several Shaft movies, has died. He was 81.
Roundtree’s death was confirmed by his longtime manager, Patrick McMinn, and his agency, Artists & Representatives Agency.
“Actor Richard Roundtree passed away this afternoon after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer,” McMinn’s statement said. “His family was with him at his bedside.” He was married and divorced twice and had five children.
Roundtree is most famously known for the Shaft franchise, which included five feature films and seven TV movies.
“Shaft,” released in 1971, was adapted from a 1970 Ernest Tidyman novel of the same name. It was Roundtree’s first film. According to a 2019 profile in The New York Times, “he had been a model, stage actor and cabdriver when the acclaimed Black photographer-turned-director Gordon Parks plucked him from a cattle call.”
“Shaft” and its sequels turned Roundtree into a blaxploitation star – a portmanteau of “Black” and “exploitation.”
He would go on to appear in more than 100 films and television shows, according to IMDb. His TV credits on widely varying shows include “Roots,” “MacGyver,” “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Being Mary Jane.”
Samuel L. Jackson, who starred alongside Roundtree in a 2000 sequel to the 1971 “Shaft,” paid tribute to him on Instagram: “The Prototype, The Best To Ever Do It!!” he wrote in a caption alongside a picture of them and actor Jessie T. Usher, who starred in a 2019 sequel.
As New York private detective John Shaft, Roundtree was a leading figure in a movement of highly profitable ’70s films that presented Black people in a manner rarely seen in mainstream movie theaters: confident and seductive, powerful and competent in a way that was authentic to Black culture of the time.
“The heroes of these films were rough, tough and, most important of all, were winners,” film scholar Susan Hayward wrote in 2000.
With a black leather jacket and thick mustache, soundtracked by Isaac Hayes’ grooves, Shaft navigated the streets with ease and left white police officers in his dust.
For some, the blaxploitation genre – of which he was a quintessential representation – presented a negative portrayal of its Black leads as oversexualized and violent. The term was coined in 1972 by NAACP Hollywood chapter leader Junius Griffin, who thought the films were taking advantage of Black audiences’ desire for representation, Robert Repino and Tim Allen wrote in the Oxford University Press blog in 2013.
For others, “the genre’s frequent use of strong male and female leads who lived by their own code was empowering,” they wrote. “African American characters who thrived outside the law exemplified a necessary rejection of an oppressive system.”
The 1971 film that marked Roundtree’s first appearance as Shaft is preserved in the National Film Registry.
Gabrielle Union, who starred in BET’s “Being Mary Jane” alongside Roundtree, described him as “ALWAYS the coolest man in the room.”
People “would literally run over to come see him. He was simply the best & we all loved him,” she said on social media.
In its statement, Roundtree’s agency said that “his trailblazing career changed the face of entertainment around the globe and his enduring legacy will be felt for generations to come.”
